What are we doing here, really? It’s a child’s question. It’s the question, whether we meditate on it throughout our lives or distract ourselves long and well enough to avoid it each and every minute. It’s always there. Are we all part of a planetary fabric, woven together, connected and large? Is it all happenstance and are we all proverbial trees falling in the forest? Do we matter, and matter to whom or what exactly? And around we go. There are, of course, more poems, songs and films than one could ever shake a stick at, asking and answering this question, and Train Dreams (based on Denis Johnson’s novella) joins them at giving it a go. Orphaned, loner, logger and railroad labourer Robert (Joel Edgerton) does his part with carving out the Pacific Northwest in 20th century America, and over the course of his life he witnesses kindnesses, injustices, hard work and violence. He’s mostly ignored, unseen, yet tethered to the land and others, in conscious and unconscious symbiosis. This one’s artsy and akin to Terrance Mallick’s poetic style of filmmaking, but I found it to be altogether more successful and watchable than Mallick’s colder, more observational attempts, in that it’s just as gradual, but softer and more intimate with its grand theme and small story. It’s stunning, slow, random and, just as it is for each and every one of us, specific to a single journey. Director Clint Bentley rocks the sweet spot between existential and entertaining, and Edgerton is spellbinding as a man simply living, whatever that means, if it needs to mean anything at all.

WATCH OR NOT: WATCH