Train Dreams
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: PG-13
Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes
Stars: Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, William H. Macy
Writers: Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar (Based on Denis Johnson’s novella)
Director: Clint Bentley
In theaters and streaming on Netflix
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
Of the 10 worthy movies nominated for this year’s Best Picture Oscar, I don’t think there’s one that will stick with me longer than Train Dreams, the almost subliminally told story of an unremarkable, yet indelibly memorable, life.
Joel Edgerton (The Boys in the Boat) stars as Robert Grainier, although to use the word “star” here seems to suggest a quality of flashiness that would appall the man he plays: Grainier, bearded, crease-faced, and stoic, is a sometimes logger, sometimes railroad worker in early 20th century Idaho. Whichever occupation he happens to be pursing at the moment, the work is punishingly hard, the men around him are similarly unschooled, the bosses are universally indifferent.
Early on, when his railroad gang sinks into a racist rage against a Chinese worker, Robert can only watch in frozen shock. Visibly, he seems unmoved. But for decades, the last moment of helpless eye contact between him and the victim will replay itself in his psyche.
In this unforgiving, seasonal cycle of wielding hammers and dragging saws, two compassionate humans find their ways into Robert’s spartan existence: A wise and friendly logger (William H. Macy, in a refreshingly engaging cameo) and, most significantly, a young woman named Gladys (Felicity Jones). Plumbing emotions that have clearly caught him by surprise, Robert is inspired to pursue a frontier version of marital bliss: He builds a cabin by a river, the pair settle down and have a daughter. He still must head off for months at a time to chop and hammer, but now he has a place, and people, to return to.
The years and decades crawl on. Unspeakable tragedy weaves itself into the fabric of Robert’s life, yet he solemnly maintains a muted undercurrent of optimism that the losses he’s suffered will someday be made whole. Eventually, old and gray (possibly, given his arduous life, barely into middle age) Robert ventures to a midsized city. He slips into a theater. The show impacts him deeply — but not as much as the moment when he sees himself in a men’s room mirror, perhaps for the first time in his life.
In 2023’s profoundly intimate drama Sing Sing, co-writer/director Clint Bentley proved his uncanny knack for revealing the private selves of inscrutable men. Departing from that film’s suffocatingly institutional setting, he and co-writer Greg Kwedar have penned a drama that unfolds on a stage as big as the great outdoors (the two camped in the wilds of Idaho while polishing the script, based on a beloved novella by Denis Johnson). Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso (whose work here won a Critics Choice Award), evokes the films of Terrence Malick at their magisterial best, finding ways to frame his subjects in the slanting light of dusk even at midday; lingering on vivid landscapes that invite you to wander onto the screen and over yonder hill.
If you come to Train Dreams looking for a Hollywood-style plot device like a sudden unexpected catastrophe or a cataclysmic twist of fate, you’ll still be waiting long after Nick Cave’s haunting (and also Oscar-nominated) title song fades with the closing credits. To be sure, the minimal script does meander down some unexpected forest paths, and while tragedies do enter the life of the man whose life we’re sharing, the crises arise in the same way they often do in real life: manifested first as nagging concern, then as unfocused anxiety, then as mounting dread and, finally, as solemn resignation. The wounds of life, Train Dreams reminds us, its calloused hand resting on our shoulder, are not always blasted with dynamite. More often they are excavated slowly, almost imperceptibly.
And that, we come to understand, is where the uniquely human miracle of quiet resilience takes hold.
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