Reviews

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  ★★★★ review by Ed Gonzalez on Letterboxd

  There's a great scene in this film where a boy proclaims that making friends is as easy as going up to them and asking them for their friendship. He puts this belief immediately into action, approaching two boys, one who's white (like him) and one's black, who accept his friendship and eventually bop their heads to his ingratiating but unmistakably earnest beatboxing. Later in the film, a white man and black man talk drunkenly about race in America, the black man reaching out to another white man, a stranger to him, and encouraging him not to call his girlfriend while he's inebriated. These men could be grown-up versions of the boys from the earlier scene, and the remarkable, rather holistic, magic of this lovely film is how all the little human stories that Albert Maysles peers in on in between don't just attest to a nation's sense of yearning but to a belief that our capacity for common decency ain't dead yet. Read a tweet by 45 today? Watch this film and heal thyself.

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  ★★★★½ review by davidehrlich on Letterboxd

  When documentary legend Albert Maysles died in March, his loss hit with the same immediacy that defined his work (the most famous of which he made with his late brother David). In Transit is enduring proof that the iconic director of vérité masterpieces like Salesman and Grey Gardens left behind even more than we first realized. Immediately joining the ranks of cinema’s most bittersweet swansongs, this gentle but (literally) moving doc takes us along for a ride on the Empire Builder, Amtrak’s busiest long-distance route. Embedding themselves on the colossal steel corridor as it snakes its way through the heart of the country from the Pacific Northwest to Chicago, Maysles and his collaborators acquaint themselves with a cross-section of passengers from all walks of life.

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  ★★★★ review by Quinitolobo on Letterboxd

  Goodbyes and hellos at train stations are easily my fondest (and less and less seen) movie cliché, the sort of emotional transitory space we can immediately understand, where all types of relationships can be renewed, ended, or suspended in an indefinite future. It’s an inherently cinematic setting: motion, steam, the hum of machinery around us as a view whizzes past and the clock relaxes its grasp. But In Transit is bracing in its devotion—also to its subject and to the non-stationary setting—to explore the internal and deeply personal space within the passengers aboard an actual train, souls at calm and minds observant of the drama shaping their lives that they're either leaving behind or on their way to face. This is a film denying everyone's climax, whether it be a welcoming embrace or tearful wave from a window, and it exists wholly within a contemplative vessel where a perpetual convoy's confessions seem to coalesce into a spirit for a speeding giant. Back and forth it goes, each stop enhancing its dimensions as if it’s guided by those unmistakable golden arches shining like a lighthouse high above the twinkle of small towns. The Empire Builder is still North America’s most frequented and longest east-to-west passenger train, stretching from the Pacific Northwest to Chicago. It’s a three-day journey that collects a true sample of working-class America, engaging with people of all ages, backgrounds, and races. They chat and laugh as their kids trade action figures, drink heartily and play card games, or sit in sleepy solitude, headphones in and mobile devices against the pitch black that swallows up the railroad ahead. Documentary titan Albert Maysles couldn’t have found a more suitable subject for his swan song, one that's also a bittersweet microcosm of his life’s work. His films have always searched for the odds and the ends, people on the fringe who must forge their own path across this wild landscape. And here it all is, along one set of tracks: the jutting shifts from beach towns to mountains to the vast plains, and the single mother of four sitting next to the old woman en route to the children she gave up for adoption decades ago. The middle-aged Native American man at a momentous crossroads with his partner and the young North Dakota oil worker drunkenly confessing his love to the girl with whom he hopes he'll spend the rest of his life. These are the stories of the everyday, exalted into a stunning portrait of our nation’s more benevolent capacities to coexist. But what’s most revealing is the common sentiment that this train offers the chance to truly be who they are, a place where they’re left to answer only to themselves and take this time in repose to sort out whatever they need to. Nowadays we travel primarily by the convenience and bustle of an airplane, a mode that doesn’t encourage this kind of openness to the people around you, or even with oneself. Maysles was always reminding us of the overlooked right up to the end, and the truths he reacquaints us to are both wonderful and comforting.

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  ★★★½ review by Sam M. on Letterboxd

  This is a movie about people on trains. I love trains. I love people.

  This movie is very very good. Go see it.

  Choo-choo.

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  ★★★½ review by Clayton Dillard on Letterboxd

  I once rode the Amtrak from Chicago to San Francisco. It was a 52 hour trip and I didn't get a sleeper car. That meant no bed and no shower for that period of time. All I could think during the last 24 hours of the trip was that I hated everyone on the train (including myself) and that I couldn't wait to stand under a high-powered, hot shower.

  I appreciate that Albert Maysles saw compassion where my discomfort only allowed me to see pain.

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