Tag Archives: Train Dreams

Oscars are often awarded to big, talky American movies full of rapid-fire dialog and insistent energy. But this year’s Best Picture nominees include powerful but quiet films that inspire deep emotion thanks to strong but subtle performances. Both Train Dreams, directed and co-written by U.S.-born director Clint Bentley, and Sentimental Value, a Norwegian film directed and co-written by Joachim Trier, create their magic using surprisingly few words. The same was true of Past Lives, Korean-born director Celine Song’s moving 2023 Best Picture Oscar nominee.

Train Dreams

Train Dreams is rich with lush and imposing scenes of rural Washington State, which stands in for Idaho ably thanks to Adolpho Veloso’s Oscar-nominated cinematography. Indeed, beautiful but often-dangerous nature plays such an important element in the story, one could almost say that the landscape is one of the film’s main characters.

Joel Edgerton’s understated performance as logger and railway worker Robert Granier is at the heart of the story. He uses few words but conveys deep feeling through gesture, tone, and his heartbreakingly expressive face. Edgerton was well cast in this role, since he’s especially gifted at expressing sadness, loss, or pain in a compelling way, without making a big, bold fuss of it. His isn’t a flashy kind of charisma, but he draws us in for exactly that reason. It’s his quiet quality that draws us closer, since we don’t want to miss a word.

The arc of the film, which is based on Dennis Johnson’s novella, includes a good deal of difficulty and lost opportunity. The story—full of love, loss, and longing—is episodic. It moves through a series of Granier’s introductions to people who connect, deeply but often briefly, to the introspective, quiet, often lonely man. Most are themselves introverted and comfortable being on their own for vast stretches of time.

Yet Granier and those who move through his life connect to each other quietly but profoundly, without a lot of talk or explanation. They bond over shared kindness, sincerity, and modesty. We don’t need to be told that these are good people; we can see and feel who they are through their actions. The film does include narration, but it’s not overly intrusive. The writers trust the audience to be able to read into the characters’ words and actions without a lot of wordy exposition. The script doesn’t explain the characters’ motivations or backstory more than necessary.

Sentimental Value

Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård brings his own quiet intensity to Sentimental Value, which has earned him his first Best Actor Academy Award nomination. He portrays a famous and much-admired film director who has always had difficulty connecting emotionally with the people he loves most.

Sentimental Value begins by introducing us to the house at the center of the story. Just as the landscape of rural Idaho plays an important role in Train Dreams, the Borg house in Sentimental Value is an essential character from beginning to end. The film begins by introducing us to the house in the many forms it’s taken over the previous century, easing us into the story through soft humor and just enough back story. Then the players take over, speaking to each other naturally in Norwegian, Swedish, English, and Danish by turns.

The film is very Nordic in tone, not only because of the location and primary languages spoken, but because of how much of the story is unspoken. The feelings are clearly there, but expressed over time, and through movements—the slow spread of emotions across a face, the silent exchange of looks between people, the mounting realization of what is about to happen based on seemingly simple, everyday movements that all add up to something shocking.

Skarsgård is a master of discomfort. In so many of his best roles, we understand how he’s feeling not because of the words he says, or even the way he says them, but by the way he shifts in his chair and diverts his attention away from things he doesn’t want to deal with. He looks silently into his lap, unable and unwilling to say the one thing that most needs to be said. Here, as in his masterful performance as Detective John River in the excellent 2015 British TV miniseries River (not to be confused with the 2012 horror series The River) Skarsgård is comfortable inhabiting discomfort. In each role, he plays a highly skilled and insightful professional. As both Gustav Borg and John River, his characters’ most intense pain comes from the emotional reticence that they must face before solving their greatest professional challenges.

Past Lives

South Korean-born Canadian director Celine Song’s debut film, Past Lives, has much in common tonally with the films mentioned above. Nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay Oscars two years ago, this film shows similar restraint. Its dialog, which is mostly in Korean, is spare. Its most important feelings are often left unexpressed, but made clear to the audience in the spaces between words.

Past Lives focuses on two characters, Nora and Hae Sung, close childhood friends in South Korea who lost track of each other when Nora’s family moved to the U.S. We first see them together in childhood, clearly enjoying being in each other’s company, but often doing so silently, or while sharing few words. We next meet up with them some two decades later, when they reconnect online, then decide to meet in person. Though some important dialog is spoken aloud, much of what passes between them is expressed through silences—eloquent and beautiful ones.

I saw Sentimental Value shortly before Past Lives. While watching actors Greta Lee and Teo Yoo give such moving performances in the latter, I was struck by the similarity between Nordic films (such as those by Joachim Trier and Ingmar Bergman) and Celine Song’s film. Though outwardly quite different in style and subject matter, they share a great deal in their characters’ comfort with silences, and in the stories’ ability to express deep feelings with few words. Both Trier and Song were born into cultures that prize emotional restraint, comfort with silence, and the belief that scenes built on tacit understanding often convey more than a page of emotionally heated dialog can.

When expressed by talented and thoughtful writers, directors, and actors, a spare script with limited dialog can allow actors to shine if they have the restraint and comfort with nuance that makes these three films so special.