There is another film that won my whole-hearted support this year.  It has not been in the news, but it should have been. It was not flashy, but it was truly meditative. It makes you think. I know not many people are interested in that these days, but I am.

There is a very interesting statement at the beginning of the film:

“There were once passageways to the old world, strange trails, hidden paths. You’d turn a corner and suddenly find yourself face-to-face with great mystery, the foundation of all things. And even though that old world is gone now, even though it’s been rolled up like a scroll and put somewhere, you can still feel the echo of it.”

 

There was a pair of old worn boots nailed into a tree with moss growing over them. Then you look up at an old tree, you can see it slowly falling down. That is the old world and it’s falling down.

 

Robert Grainier, the protagonist, who lived more than 80 years. He went west from Idaho to a place near the ocean, but never bothered to see the ocean. He didn’t need to see it. Why would he? He had lost his parents but he never how or why. No one ever told him. His connections were gone. One of his first memories is seeing the mass deportation of 100 or more Chinese families from town. Why was that necessary? No one has a good answer for that, just like none will have an answer for the current mass deportations either.  The narrator, who seems like the voice of God in this film, says, “Grainer was baffled by the casualness of the violence.” So am I. I know many people like it. I remember when I watched the 2020 Republican National Convention when people cheered with glee as Trump promised to bring about “mass deportation.” They loved it.

 

Graineir’s life was meaningless, until he fell in love with Gladys. Until then his life had little meaning. Suddenly it had some.  She told him, “She told him, “Right now I could just about understand everything there is.” Now that is meaning! The meaning of life. “All of a sudden, life made sense to Grainier, as if he’d been pulling hard the wrong way and was now turned around and headed down stream.”

 

He got a job working for a railway crew and wished he’d never done that. He saw a young Chinese man inexplicably pulled from his crew and tossed off a bridge into a deep ravine to his death. No one knew what he had done to deserve that.

 

The men built a bridge across a river and were told they had done something amazing.  But 10 years later a new and better bridge was built 10 miles away that rendered their bridge obsolete.  Amazing doesn’t last long. The old bridge was abandoned. Like old things often are.

 

As soon as Robert started to know he was back at home, it was logging season and time to leave again. “His work was populated with itinerant men. Most without homes, without families. They moved from job to job, state to state, as the work dictated.” Unconnected. Not rooted to the ground like old trees. “He once worked alongside a man for 2 months without saying a single word.” Trees talk more than that.  Someone asked the man if he had ever been to California and he just asked, “Is there no place where a man can get some peace?” And then he got up and moved. Those were the only words he ever heard the man speak.  Now that man was alienated. He had no connection with other men other than the work.  Words were no connection for him. He liked being unconnected.

 

One man lived in a hole in a big tree. Another faller, Apostle Frank, worked with Robert and kept talking continuously of God. And he spoke about the Bible as if he had been there when it was written down. Nice to have such certainty. As he told Robert, “Sometimes God has to find strange ways to tell you what you need to hear. Sometimes it’s a donkey talking to you.”

 

A logger, Arn, who came to blow up trees sang a song at night: “If the Lord was a redwood would you try to cut Him down? Or climb up His loving branches and look around?”

Robert asked Arn, “do you think bad things that you do follow you through life?”  Arn replied, “I don’t know, I’ve seen bad men raised up and good men brought to their knees. If figure that I could figure it out, I’d be a lot better-looking than you.” He did not feel connected to past mistakes.

The narrator said, “Grainier worried more and more that something terrible was following him, that death would find him out here, far away from the only place he really wanted to be.” That was his family. He was still connected but remotely.

When he got home and saw his daughter every time she seemed like a different person and he felt like he was missing his whole life. Which of course was true.

Even though money was tight, when he was home he later realized it was the happiest time of his life. Robert and Gladys just wanted to spend more time together with their daughter Katie.

Arn knew the work as hard. “That’ because it’s rough work, gentlemen, not just on the body but on the soul. We just cut down trees that have been here for 500 years. It upsets a man’s soul whether you recognize it or not.”  I agree. Lots of jobs are like that. Soul-destroying work.  Another logger said he would have $200 in his pocket after the work was done and that would not bother his soul. Who was right?

 

Arn said,  echoing John Muir, “This world is intricately stitched together. Every thread we pull, we know not how it affects the design of things. We’re but children on this earth, pulling bolts out of the Ferris wheel, thinking ourselves to be gods.”

 

Another logger said there were “enough logs to cut for a thousand years. And when the last ones cut, well the first one will be growed up as big as anything around today. Arn said he thought the same thing when he was young. Arn said, “My family is everywhere there is a smiling face. Never been somewhere I didn’t have some family there. Except for Kansas.  That state is filled with savage lunatics.” Unfortunately, much of the modern world is filled with savage lunatics, not just Kansas. They are all around.

 

One day a large of a tree hit him in the head and he was not the same. Somedays he could not remember his name. Yet, Arn  looked around and said, “It’s beautiful aint it?”  “What part?” asked Robert. “All of it, “ he said. “Every bit of it.”

 

Another day he was no longer a logger.  “The last few years he expected some great revelation about his life would descend upon him. But as of yet, none had. And he was beginning to doubt that one ever would.” He met a young lady, Claire, who said others had told her he was different.  Robert asked, “Ain’t everybody different?”  “No”, he said. She said, “It’s good to be different.”  I agree, but it’s OK if you’re not. She loved the valley because it carved out all the mountains. alleys. It’s where all the lakes come from. Referring to the time when massive gushes of water from melting glaciers cut deep into mountains and prairies alike, she said, “It must have felt like the world was coming to an end.” Yup, I think. Then she asked, “That’s where did all those myths come from, you know?  All those flood stories. All those different religions all over the world. It’s just the same story. Different slants…I don’t mean to be disrespectful about anything you believe in. The world’s an old place. Probably nothing it hasn’t seen by now.” They are all connected.

 

Robert told Claire how his wife and baby did not make it through the fire. He tells her, “Sometimes it just feels like the sadness is going to eat you alive.” She has a similar story. She lost her husband a year ago.

 

Claire tells him:

 

 “…And when it was over, it was like there was a hole in the world…I had more questions than answers…When you go through something like that, nothing you do is crazy…In the forest every least thing’s important. It’s all threaded together, so you can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins, if you really look at it. The little insects you can’t even see, they play a role as vital as the river. The dead tree is as important as the living one. There must be something for us to learn from that.”

 

Robert asks her, “What if you haven’t got anymore to give?” Claire replies, “The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit.”

 

One day he went to the big city and “wandered the city without much direction or purpose, as if looking for something he had misplaced a long time ago.”  Meandering. Then he went to a theatre of mysteries. They advertised that there would be “Sun Tzu, the holy man, will read your dreams.” Are those train dreams? The shill said, “pay you a dime to see a monster…Inside this theatre the mysteries of the world flit about like bats and insects. Here, all the answers to everything.” That’s a pretty big promise. The monster was only a boy in a costume. A puny monster. It made him cry. He saw his face in a mirror for the first time in a decade and could see the toll the years had taken. He felt that he was only just beginning to have some faint understanding of his life, even though it was now slipping away from him.

 

For $4 he got an airplane ride “to see the world as only the birds see it.’

He died in 1968.  As the narrator said,

 

“His life ended as quietly as it had begun. He’d never purchased a firearm or spoken into a telephone. He had no idea who his parents had might have been, and he left no heirs behind him. But on that spring day as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt at last connected to it all.”

He really was face to face with a mystery.

This is quiet film. Too quiet for most viewers who prefer loud action and computer generated mayhem. Too quiet to win the Academy award, but I like quiet films, that make you ponder. My kind of film.