Clint Bentley’s film of Denis Johnson’s novella is patient, beautifully shot and carried by a Joel Edgerton performance built almost entirely out of watching. It loses a little every time Will Patton’s narration tells us what a silence meant.
Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) is a day labourer in the Idaho panhandle in the early years of the twentieth century. He fells trees, hauls timber and lays track for the railways pushing through the forest, and he does nearly all of it without speaking. Clint Bentley’s film, written with Greg Kwedar from Denis Johnson’s short novel, follows him from boyhood to old age, and takes 102 minutes to do it. It is a good film and we recommend it, with one reservation that got larger as it went along.
Edgerton is the reason to go. Grainier has a few dozen lines, and Edgerton plays him as a man who listens harder than anyone around him and never knows what to do with what he hears. The scene that sets the terms comes early, on a railway bridge gang, and we will not describe what the crew does to a labourer named Fu Sheng (Alfred Hsing), except that Grainier is part of it. We were horrified, and more horrified by what follows, which is lunch. Edgerton keeps that moment in his face for the rest of the film; it comes back in dreams and in the way he looks at strangers.
Then he meets Gladys (Felicity Jones) and the film slows to the pace of a marriage. Their home is a cabin in the woods, and Alexandra Schaller’s production design makes it a real one: a single room, unfinished planks, a stove, a bed you could believe took a week to make. Malgosia Turzanska dresses them in wool and canvas that darkens over the years without ever looking like costume. Jones is light here; Gladys teases, reads aloud, laughs at her husband’s silences rather than waiting them out. These scenes moved us more than the grander ones later. A daughter arrives. Grainier goes off to the logging camps each summer to pay for it all.
The logging camps are the film’s other half. William H. Macy’s Arn Peeples talks more than the rest of the crew put together, and Macy plays him without a wink, which is why he lands. Clifton Collins Jr. and John Diehl fill out the crew as men who have never done anything else. Nathaniel Arcand’s Ignatius Jack, a neighbour who trades with Grainier, gets little screen time and makes it count. Adolpho Veloso shoots all of it in low natural light, the sun coming sideways through cedars, and when a tree comes down he holds the shot long enough for us to feel the size of it. Parker Laramie cuts between camp, cabin and memory with dissolves rather than hard cuts, so the years slide.
Our reservation is Will Patton. His narration is drawn from Johnson’s prose and he reads it well, in the voice of a man telling a story by a stove. The trouble is how much of it there is. Johnson’s book is short and flat and lets terrible things sit on the page unremarked; Bentley keeps the events and adds a voice to tell us what Grainier felt about them, sometimes while Edgerton is already showing us. Bryce Dessner’s score does the same, strings rising under moments that were full to begin with. Twice we caught ourselves resenting being told, and both times Edgerton had the scene in hand without help. Most critics have reached for Terrence Malick, and we see the resemblance in the light. But this narration explains.
The second half moves in ways we will not describe. Kerry Condon appears in it as Claire Thompson, a stranger kinder to Grainier than he knows what to do with, and their one long conversation is the best late scene in the film. Paul Schneider’s Apostle Frank passes through as a preacher of a familiar American kind, all promise and no patience. The country being built around Grainier arrives on schedule: railways, mills, thinning forest. The narration notes each one in the tone of someone reading out the weather.
It is a 12A, and a slow one, and the two of you should agree before the lights go down that nothing here is going to happen fast. See it on the largest screen you can, for the trees. Then read the book, in one sitting, and notice how much it gets said without a narrator.
