‘Train Dreams’ Is an Argument Against Complicity

Spoilers follow for Train Dreams , which is streaming on Netflix.

In Train Dreams , Joel Edgerton’s Robert Grainier is a man who keeps his head down. He lives with his wife and daughter on an isolated parcel of land in Bonners Ferry, Idaho. He does his job as a logger efficiently and quietly, working in companionable silence with most of his co-workers. He doesn’t get drunk; he isn’t in debt; he doesn’t get involved in situations that don’t immediately seem to pertain to him. In other words, he minds his own business.

But Grainier’s defining quality translates to inaction when a group of vigilantes attacks one of his co-workers. In the Denis Johnson novella the film is based on, that co-worker is a Chinese laborer accused of theft; Grainier tries to help kill him and believes that