It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to the next picture show, a movie of the week podcast devoted to a classic film

in the way it shaped our thoughts on our recent release. I'm Keith Phipps here again with

Genevieve Kosky, Tasha Robinson, and Scott Tobias. Hello, everyone. Good to see you again.

Oh, you two, Keith. It's been so long. I know it has been very long minutes even.

In our last episode, we discussed Terrence Malick's 1978 classic Days of Heaven, a lyrical

story of love, murder, farming, and locusts set in the Texas panhandle just before World War I.

This episode takes us a little further north as we talk about a new movie that

put us in mind of Days of Heaven, Clint Bentley's Train Dreams. Weighing in it just over 100

pages, Tennis Johnson's 2011 novella Train Dreams, his penultimate published work, recounts the life of

Robert Grainier, a man who spends most of his days as a hermit in the

forest of the American Northwest. Robert's an orphan whose own origins are unclear to him,

and not a man who makes connections easily. But he is one who ruminates on his place within the

world extensively and feels the weight of his past mistakes, both real and perceived. It's in many

ways the story of a man living apart from the world,

both physically and spiritually, despite a desire to understand it. It's not, in other words,

the sort of plot-driven work that translates easily to the screen. That doesn't mean it can't be translated gracefully and with great beauty, however, as evidenced by Clint Bentley's film.

Joel Edgerton, an actor capable of conveying great feeling even when given just a few

words, plays Robert, opposite Felicity Jones, William H. Macy, Clifton Collins, Jr., and Carrie Condon

as characters who play important roles in his life, and Robert's understanding of his place in the

...