The Perfect Movie for a Quiet Holiday

It’s Thanksgiving Eve here in Estados Unidos, which means much of our fair country will spend the morrow shoveling down food and/or sitting in endless holiday traffic and/or watching football and/or falling asleep to football and/or sitting in uncomfortable silence while their formerly sane uncle launches into a deranged political rant that nobody wants to hear.

These are the memories that piece together a life…

But here at mi casa? It’ll be pretty chill, pretty relaxed.

I’ll be cooking Thanksgiving dinner for the family, and we’ll just enjoy the day off and the food and the relative peace and quiet. It’ll just be the four of us, since we no longer live near extended family, and therefore won’t need to host or travel to a large gathering, like we used to. We enjoyed those gatherings. But we’ll also enjoy not having the gatherings.

Thanksgiving ranks as maybe my favorite holiday, and has been for a long, long time. It’s like the anti-holiday. It’s held every November to celebrate the Pilgrims and Native Americans breaking bread hundreds of years ago — or so we’re told.

But it’s really just an opportunity to reset our personal buttons for a day, and give thanks for whatever blessings we hold dear, away from the Helter Skelter of the world beyond.

It’s a day dedicated to eating massive piles of food, anchored by turkey, gravy and stuffing. It’s a day for lounging around and not getting into a fevered rush to do much of anything else.

I might not leave the house on Thanksgiving Day. In fact, I’m 99.3% sure I won’t.

And I’m 100% cool with that.

*****

Two of my most memorable Thanksgivings happened decades ago, when I was a bachelor living in places I had only recently moved to. On both occasions, I was invited by some very nice people to join them for their Thanksgiving feasts. I guess they figured I was alone and far away from family and friends, and didn’t want me to spend Thanksgiving staring at a microwave dinner in front of the telly.

What they didn’t know, and couldn’t know, was that I really, really looked forward to being alone on Thanksgiving Day. What they didn’t know is that I have never, ever had a problem being alone. My plans on both occasions were to cook a big pot of chili (very unThanksgiving), drink a few beers, and watch football until my eyes dropped out of their sockets.

Well, the first time was when I was living in Greenwood, South Carolina, and worked as a reporter for a newspaper there. It was my first full-time job, post-college, so I was but a young lad. I was invited to Thanksgiving dinner by a woman who worked at the paper. I didn’t have the heart to say no, so I dropped my plans and joined her and her family. They were a nice and gracious bunch of folks whose names I have long since forgotten.

The second time happened about 20 years later, when I had just moved to Los Angeles and was invited by a coworker and her husband to join them for Thanksgiving. Well, this time I was in my early 40s (still a bachelor, working for a different newspaper), and much less worried about doing the considerate thing. Plus, it would require a long drive through LA traffic, which is the Seventh Circle of Hell. So I made up a flimsy excuse not to join them. I felt kinda bad about it and kinda not. I spent part of Thanksgiving riding my bike along the beach in sunny SoCal, then cooked a big pot of chili, enjoyed many beers, watched a lot of football, and had a grand old time.

The coworker and I became good friends during my time in LA. But I never let on about how I blew them off for Thanksgiving dinner just so I could do what I wanted to do….

*****

Today, on Thanksgiving Eve, I did something I rarely do – I took the afternoon off and watched a movie. I had finished my work that morning, and had gotten ahead of the Thanksgiving cooking chores by making several dishes early. I had some free time after lunch, and decided to watch a movie on Netflix.

The move was Train Dreams, a 2025 release I had never heard of until I got an email from Esquire that linked to an article informing me that it was a movie “every man needs to see.” What caught my eye was that it was based on a novella by Denis Johnson, a writer I really like, though I had never read this particular work.

I won’t go into a lot of detail about the movie. You can read about it here or here (be careful of spoilers, though).

Here’s the short version: It follows the life of a logger in Idaho during the early 20^th century, and the woman he met and fell in love with, and the home and family they started, and his experiences working in logging camps and on a railroad construction crew. He’s a regular dude living a regular life, facing the regular ups and downs, in the regular way.

The movie doesn’t aspire to anything greater – and that’s the beauty of it. It is only concerned with telling the story of this central character, and how he tries to navigate the random and sometimes cruel experiences life tosses at him.

Train Dreams delves into familiar themes: family and work, guilt and prejudice, nature and technology, hope and loss. It’s both heartwarming and heartbreaking. In some ways it is both the most heartwarming and heartbreaking film I have ever seen. The performances are pitch perfect, and so are the directing and screenplay.

Although I didn’t plan things this way, it also aligned perfectly with the Thanksgiving holiday and my particular mood these days. It’s a quiet and understated movie in a loud and angry culture. Just as Thanksgiving is the anti-holiday, Train Dreams is the anti-movie.

I can’t think of a single flashy, overwrought scene, a single line or image that aimed to crank up the drama just for the sake of cranking up the drama.

Not once – not one single time – did I ever feel like it was trying to manipulate the audience with the usual emotive tricks or memorable lines, searing music or film-school camera angles.

The drama it conveyed came at you organically, in small doses and modest moments, much like life itself. Most lives do not unfold in loud bursts. They do so in the dark corners, with nobody around, when you can either weep or laugh, but either way the world won’t take much notice.

As a writer, I cannot tell you how much I appreciated the discipline it took for the writers of this movie to dial things back, to stick to the quiet themes, and not cave into the temptation to make bold statements with the usual cheap tricks.

We need more of this in a world determined to find monsters around every corner, filled with shrill voices that never shut up but never say anything important.

Thanksgiving is a quiet holiday that carries tremendous meaning. Train Dreams is its cinematic equivalent.

I’m glad I took the afternoon off to watch it.

Image: Netflix