A conflicted elegy for an America poisoned by manifest destiny, Denis Johnson’s captivating 2011 novella spans most of a century, from the rapid expansion of the railways in the 1910s to the thundering highways of the 1960s. Adapting this much-lauded miniature epic might seem like a fool’s errand, but Clint Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar, who previously collaborated on Sing Sing, capture the grandeur, tragedy and intimacy of Johnson’s work without slipping into nostalgia for an idealised kind of West inhabited by John Wayne.
Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), a loner labourer going wherever the work takes him as industrialisation spreads westwards, epitomises strong but silent American masculinity. “There were once passageways to the old world,” narrator Will Patton intones over images of a train track emerging from a tunnel. “You’d turn a corner and find yourself faced with a great mystery.” This sounds like pure romanticism but it’s quickly subverted. The film opens with Grainier witnessing a horrific act of violence that will haunt him for the rest of his days: a Chinese labourer, accused of some unknown crime or just of being conspicuously Other, is seized by a group of men and thrown from their newly built railway bridge to his death, with Grainier having barely intervened. It’s not so much an inciting incident as an omen or a curse.
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Grainier falls for the vivacious Gladys (Felicity Jones) and the two build a cabin on a riverbank and have a baby daughter. All is pastoral bliss until a terrible tragedy befalls them. This is broadly all that happens, but to describe the plot is to undermine one of the film’s many strengths: its non-linear unfolding of images and fragments of the story as if we the audience are drawn into Grainier’s memory. And these images by cinematographer Adolpho Veloso are exquisite: a steam train roaring over a bridge at night, a deep-focus tableau of a logger posing within the trunk of a half-cut-down tree, a “wolf boy” in a circus show, each gaining layers of meaning as the film progresses.
Edgerton, for whom this film has been a passion project for years, has never been better as Grainier, seamlessly inhabiting the role with a kind of quiet desperation. There are lovely supporting performances too, especially from William H Macy as an eccentric dynamite expert and Kerry Condon as a former World War One nurse who opens Grainier’s eyes to the ancient majesty of the landscape.
Some of the novella’s rougher edges have been sanded down and there are moments where it threatens to slip into sentimentality. But although lengthy passages of narration can often feel distinctly un-cinematic, here Bentley and Kwedar have wisely ascertained that Johnson’s prose is unbeatable and an audience might benefit from some insight into a character as internal as Grainier. Combined with the cinematography and Bryce Dessner’s contemplative score, the result is a melancholic, Terrence Malick-ian vision of a place that is brutal, beautiful and forever lost to time.