Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams is a peach of a picture. At once miniaturist yet epic, it’s an exquisite film that touches on every human emotion – agony, ecstasy, discovery, surprise, togetherness, loneliness – without contrivance or strain.
A film of captured moments – some that feel much more important in the rear-view mirror – it’s an elegiac character study that perfectly expresses the emotions its protagonist is unable to articulate. Until he does.
Based on a 2011 novella by Denis Johnson, Train Dreams is one of those rare films that tackles a so-called ordinary life and illuminates it as rich, complex and extraordinary. Joel Edgerton is Robert Grainier, a logger and railroad worker in the US at the turn of the century.
We follow him from being a soft-spoken orphan unaware of who his parents are to his death in the late ’60s (he gets to marvel at space travel) meaning, as well as everything else that is going on, Train Dreams is also a snapshot of a nation during a period of radical change and growth.
But mostly sophomore director Bentley and co-screenwriter Greg Kwedar (the pair co-wrote Kwedar’s Sing Sing) concentrate on Robert’s days clearing the forests and pathways for train tracks in the Pacific Northwest. Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso finds stunning image after stunning image – a mist rolling across a landscape, a locomotive barrelling over a bridge at night – but these sections thrive on Robert’s encounters with fellow itinerant workers, each interaction offering pearls of wisdom that Robert takes forward in the world (William H Macy shines as an ageing, eccentric but perceptive explosives expert).
It’s an exquisite film that touches on every human emotion
Along the way, Robert meets Gladys (Felicity Jones), a strong-willed local woman with a pragmatic mind and a dead eye with a rifle. Their courtship remains one of the loveliest relationships put on screen this year, a patchwork of vignettes building into an affecting portrait of domestic bliss. While Edgerton gives an authentic portrayal of a man moon-eyed over the way his partner says his name, Jones, in brief economic strokes, makes Gladys more than a passive male fantasy figure, gritty, intelligent, the dynamo in the relationship. As they never said in 1910s Idaho, #CouplesGoals.
The emphasis on nature in general and the preponderance of grass-in-twilight images in particular invokes Terrence Malick (particularly Days of Heaven), but Train Dreams has (ironically) less dreaminess and more narrative snap, Will Patton’s eloquent third person narration providing humour, a shaggy dog storytelling quality and the ability to flit back-and-forth in time.
The film finds its anchor in a career-best Edgerton, revealing layers beneath a thoughtful but taciturn exterior, suggesting a fullness of feeling, both light and dark, behind the eyes. In the most unpretentious way, it’s a film about characters wrestling with the biggest questions – grief, memory, the connectedness of the universe, the point of existence – made all the more remarkable given they are living such a hardscrabble existence.
Without simplifying anything, Train Dreams is ultimately a film that looks for and finds the good in people and in life. Wherever Clint Bentley goes next – especially if Edgerton and Jones tag along – we’ll happily go with him – by train or otherwise.
In UK cinemas Nov 7. On Netflix from Nov 21.