Adapted from Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, Train Dreams is Clint Bentley’s elegiac portrait of a man (and his country) undergoing a quietly radical transformation.
Following his acclaimed script for Sing Sing, the director turns his attention to the woodsy romance of the United States of the early 20th century, through the person of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), a nomadic logger and railroad worker whose unremarkable existence mirrors the US’s stealthy march towards modernity.
From Robert’s birth in the 1890s to his death in the 1950s, the script can feel like a western or a fable. When Robert meets and marries Gladys (Felicity Jones), the two mark out their future on a patch of wild land in Washington State. But fate and time conspire to erode their modest version of the American dream.
Bentley and his co-writer, Greg Kwedar, frame this story of love, loss and endurance with tenderness and temporal grace, with a multigenerational arc that ends after Apollo 8’s voyage around the moon in 1968. The film has a stately aura of permanence, like one of the railways that the hero is toiling on.
Abode review: A sincere Irish Christmas movie about home and the absence of it
Train Dreams review: Joel Edgerton gives monumental performance in film with echoes of Terrence Malick
Anemone review: This grandiose, inventively operatic project starring Daniel Day-Lewis is no ordinary film
Die My Love review: Jennifer Lawrence’s new film could be the worst date movie ever made
Visually, it evokes the golden reverie of Terrence Malick and the pioneering romanticism of Heaven’s Gate. The cinematographer Adolpho Veloso simultaneously casts the Pacific Northwest as an idyll, a feral frontier and an expanse brutalised and shrunken by modernity.
Bryce Dessner’s delicate score hums like an elegy for lost trees.
Will Patton’s narration adds to Malickian effect and allows Train Dreams to preserve the rhythms of Johnson’s spare, spiritual prose.
Edgerton’s monumental performance is an archaeological expedition where everything valuable is buried beneath the surface. It requires a late encounter with Kerry Condon’s forestry-service worker to tease out something confessional from the reticent hero.
His poignant ordinariness and interiority place him at stark odds with Hollywood’s insistence on agency. It also earths the film’s welcome swerves into the supernatural.
[ Joel Edgerton: ‘I’ve always enjoyed playing and celebrating quieter characters’Opens in new window ]
Jones brings depth to Gladys, a character that might have existed only as a papery love interest, while the ecological sermons of William H Macy’s loquacious explosives expert intersect with Ted Kaczynski’s lament in Industrial Society and Its Future, aka the Unabomber manifesto.
Bentley sometimes leans too heavily on lyricism and voiceover, but the film’s earnestness and restraint cast a strange spell. Train Dreams may mourn a disappearing US, but, more movingly, its muted reverence salutes those nation builders who were never visible to begin with.
In cinemas from Friday, November 7th, and streaming on Netflix from Friday, November 21st
