Sundance this year was, at least from my end, pretty darned fantastic, with a couple of borderline-great films and a whole lot of really, really good ones.
Train Dreams was one of the greats, and it swept me away in just a few seconds. Joel Edgerton stars as a man in the Pacific Northwest in the early 20th century who works first building the railroad, and then later as a logger, cutting down parts of the vast Washington forests. We’re told his story in voiceover, and it makes us feel as if we’re being told a fable, or maybe being told the Great American Story, except this one isn’t based in some idea of bootstraps, but instead in the small lives lived as the world around changes drastically. The movie is clearly inspired by the work of Terrence Malick and Andrew Dominik’s masterpiece The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and if you’re going to wear your influences as proudly as this movie does, these are pretty good places to draw from. The film is gorgeously shot, ethereal, elegiac, and undoubtedly will end up somewhere on my best-of-the-year list.
The other one that was nearly as good is called Sorry, Baby, which is written by, directed by, and stars Eva Victor as a university professor working at her alma mater, which is also the place where she experienced a “bad thing” a few years earlier. We suspect what the bad thing is, and we’re proven correct as we jump around in time filling in holes, but this movie isn’t about trying to put together some kind of puzzle—it’s about how women cope with that kind of trauma while most people around seem to treat it as routine, how there are, still, plenty of supportive people in the world, even in surprising places, and how our reactions are often a lot more complicated than we want to realize. The movie is also often quite funny, despite the topic, as Victor recognizes the strangeness of people and that life continues, regardless of circumstances.
You can find my thoughts on everything I saw at Sundance at kmuw.org.
