Review of Last Train Home (2009) by Sam B — 29 Aug 2011

Great fictional movies are great, but they cannot compete with the best documentaries. Last Train Home belongs in this incomparable pantheon.

Imagine if Michael Moore spent less screen time collaging facts and melodrama and instead just focused on one family, one sole example to represent a greater perspective of human drama...What would you see? That indeed, that the downtrodden will survive, despite living at the bottom of a flawed system? That culture-wide fallacies are often more damaging to a family than infrastructural shortcomings? Maybe... perhaps if the cameras rolled long enough, the people who are supposed to be victims reveal their personal flaws, and you see: they are not as worthy of success as you initially thought. Worse off, even if they were perfectly innocent, it would become clear that theirs is a problem all too common to command charity.

In Last Train Home, there are no martyrs. There are no slick suited corporate tyrants. There is no heavy handed-ness on the part of the filmmaker. There are only Chinese Migrant workers, eating, traveling, and striving for more. The subject may seem banal upon description, but, I promise you, there are few better ways to spend 90 minutes. Promise.