only<\/em>\u2014motivating event of Grainier\u2019s life. We get many flashbacks to his time with Gladys and Kate, who\u2019s rewritten to have been about 2\u2014the right age to walk and talk cutely\u2014when she dies, as opposed to 4 months old in Johnson\u2019s novella. This is a key change, helping give Grainier\u2019s brief period of home life much more significance in the movie. While first grieving, Johnson writes, Grainier \u201cthought of poor little Kate and talked to himself again out loud: \u2018She never even growed up to a sprout.\u2019 \u201d Later, as the grief mellows, Grainier thinks of Gladys more often than his daughter: \u201cSometimes he thought about Kate, the pretty little tyke, but not frequently. Hers was not such a sad story. She\u2019d hardly been awake, much less alive.\u201d Not so the girl in the film, who\u2019s full of toddler sweetness, and whom Grainier and his wife nickname \u201cKatie.\u201d<\/p>\nCertainly, the deaths of Kate and Gladys shape Grainier in the novella, but not in the self-flagellating, constant-flashbacks, \u201cI should have been there for them\u201d way of the movie. The Grainier of the book lives in a world where many other terrible things also happen, with effects that are obscure or unknowable. Two brutal standalone stories that have been truncated or eliminated in the film mark Grainier\u2019s life in the novella. In one, young Grainier encounters a tramp (a \u201c \u2018boomer,\u2019 as his sort was known\u201d) who is lying in the woods in a terrible state. This man tells Grainier that he\u2019s been robbed by another tramp, who has \u201ccut through the cords\u201d of his knee and left him there to die of gangrene. He goes on to give Grainier a deathbed confession: This tramp used to sexually molest his niece, who got pregnant, was beaten by her father for it (\u201cto drive that poor child out of her belly\u201d), and died. This was the event that put this boomer on the rails: \u201cI\u2019ve never been a hundred yards from these train tracks ever since.\u201d<\/p>\n
The second is the tale of Kootenai Bob, a Native American neighbor of Grainier\u2019s, who is transformed in the film into the much more conventional ally and friend character of the storekeeper Ignatius Jack (Nathaniel Arcand). \u201cKootenai Bob was a steady man who had always refused liquor and worked frequently at jobs in town, just as Grainier did, and they\u2019d known each other for many years,\u201d Johnson writes. We are just introduced to this man, then a few pages later, Johnson writes of his death. Bob accepts shandy\u2014lemonade mixed with beer\u2014from a couple of visiting Canadian ranch hands and believes them when they swear \u201che could drink this with impunity, as the action of the lemon juice would nullify any effect of the beer.\u201d For the first time, Bob gets drunk, and he passes out across the railroad tracks, where he\u2019s \u201crun over by a succession of trains.\u201d By the next afternoon, \u201cKootenai Bob was strewn for a quarter mile along the right-of-way,\u201d Johnson writes.<\/p>\n
The encounter with the tramp puts young Grainier, who had been aimless, on the straight and narrow. Kootenai Bob\u2019s story is important in Grainier\u2019s life, perhaps, because it\u2019s a sudden tragedy that comes from nowhere, the way the fire did for his family. But the movie wants more easily scannable meaning from its encounters, and, in deleting the tale of the boomer and the fate of Kootenai Bob, and instead adding such scenes as the one where a Black man with a rifle comes into a lumber camp and shoots a worker he says had killed his brother \u201cfor the color of his skin,\u201d it gets it.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s one more arc that the movie flattens even further, smoothing over the weirdness of the original tale. In the film, a child shows up at Grainier\u2019s cabin years after the fire that killed his daughter. He believes she is Kate. In Johnson\u2019s novella, however, the people around his town tell one another about a \u201cwolf-girl\u201d who supposedly haunts the forest. Grainier is terrified of the idea, like he would be of a ghost story. But also, he believes he hears Gladys tell him, in a visitation, that she died, but Kate survived the fire. In an episode whose reality is difficult to parse, an older child appears at the cabin, with eyes that \u201csparked greenly in the lamplight, like those of any wolf\u201d and a face \u201cthat of a wolf, but hairless.\u201d She\u2019s injured, and has no hair; \u201cshe\u2019d snatched herself nearly bald.\u201d She growls, barks, and snaps, and has \u201cleathery\u201d skin, like an old man, \u201ccalloused stumps\u201d for wrists, a face that seemed \u201cto have no life behind it when the eyes were closed\u201d\u2014a child like an animal.<\/p>\n
Is this really Kate? Is Kate a wolf? Did any child at all appear at his dwelling? It\u2019s an open-ended moment, showing us the witchy liminality of the landscape and the susceptible nature of Grainier\u2019s mind. In the film, all these lupine qualities are gone. The child visitor has black hair, where Kate had blond; otherwise, she\u2019s just a normal kid. While it\u2019s odd that she\u2019s shown up at Grainier\u2019s cabin, injured, in the middle of the night, she\u2019s no visitation, just a human mystery.<\/p>\n
This new Train Dreams <\/em>delves deep into a father\u2019s sadness, giving us a story that\u2019s more about Grainier\u2019s one big grief than it is about the side tales and odd supernatural moments Johnson stuffs into his re-creation of a bygone world. It\u2019s still beautiful, moving, and thoughtful. And perhaps all these choices make sense\u2014a true adaptation of Johnson\u2019s Train Dreams<\/em> would probably be far too tufty to wind up on Netflix.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Denis Johnson\u2019s award-winning novella Train Dreams\u2014the source material of a new Netflix movie that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year\u2014was first published in the Paris Review in 2002, then made available as a book in 2011. You can read it in 70 to 90 minutes, but somehow that brief spell of time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2170811,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[345516,367137,345515],"class_list":["post-2170810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-denis-johnson","tag-robert-grainier","tag-train-dreams"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/A-Beloved-Seemingly-Unadaptable-Book-Has-Been-Transformed-Into-a.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2170810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2170810"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2170810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2170812,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2170810\/revisions\/2170812"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2170811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2170810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2170810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2170810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}