Train Dreams🧜 has the somber weight of an epic. Set in the early twentieth century, Clint Bentley’s film is as soberingly philosophical as it is anchored in everyday human acts. Hoping, believing, measures of resilience are weighed up in their composite whole. Each element doesn’t occupy so much an isolated position as it falls within congruent harmony. It is a towering, spiritually immersed adaptation of Denis Johnson’s eponymous 2011 novella. The protagonist, Robert Grainier’s (Joel Edgerton) solitariness juxtaposes with the film’s enlarging scope. A logger in the Pacific Northwest, he moves absently through the world until he meets the love of his life, Gladys (Felicity Jones). Nothing interested him prior. Now, suddenly, life starts making sense to him, the narrator (Will Patton, richly evoking the full arc of a life) notes. It seems as if he had been walking in a totally opposite direction. The world now looks filled with possibilities, afresh and joyously alive.
⛄Robert and Gladys’ getting together is quick, effortless, as natural as the life-cycles of mighty landscapes surrounding them. Marriage is followed by all steps of building a life together. They make their own cabin by the river. Happiness seems firm, secure until it is not. Whenever Robert’s home life settles down into a pattern of bliss, a work assignment, lugging season plucks him out, sending him back on the road. His fate is that of a wanderer. As much as he wishes to be with his wife and daughter, the constant search to scrape together a livelihood rips him away. An ultimately futile railroad construction project he takes up, the naked violence he witnesses haunts him forever. He returns only to be whisked away again and again, until a crushing loss snatches everything he’s built.
Bentley’s gentle, understated handing and Edgerton’s impeccably measured, richly subtle performance guarantee you stick by Robert through each tragic visitation. There’s ample scope here for emotional manipulation but the subdued tone resists it. Instead you feel the sadness quietly grow deep within, along with stolid awe. Having co-written the adapted screenplay with Greg Kwedar, Bentley distinctively fleshes out every flickering connection and encounter. Everyone he meets has their story, lesson to share. One of the earliest keys to the film’s philosophy comes from the older Arn (William H. Macy) , a sort of mentor to Robert: “a tree can be a friend if you leave it alone, but as soon as you put a blade in it, then you have a war on your handsജ”. He emphasizes we are children of the earth. His epistle is met with dismissal by the younger folks. But soon, the gravity in it will take shape into unspeakable tragedy. Gradual existential heaviness the job of felling ancient trees, the long history it’s seen, quietly swells to spiritually scaffold the sweeping tale of one seemingly discrete individual’s life. Every move, small as you might think, affects the entire fabric, ecosystems irrevocably shifting with each extraction, blow.
The world is full of grief and harshness, losses inextricable from living. However, the kindness of strangers also offers their own form of rescue. It’s a drama about growth - shedding and renewal; finality shrouds man’s whims and decisions vis-à-vis nature, so attaches transience to his place in the world. Though a late entrant to the film, Kerry Condon, essaying an experienced forestry officer, unlocks its thematic core. Radiant as ever, her Claire has one of the best scenes in the film. “A dead tree is as important as the living one”, she says.
Train Dreams resides equally in rhythms of nature and man’s smallness within the universe’s grand schemes. Impossible as it is turn back the wheel of time and undo our ravages, it’s never too late to acknowledge, submit to our realization, halt further course. Man’s hubris, an impulse towards tunnel vision holds no candle to the universe, its overwhelming power, the force in its settling scores. Train Dreamsꦬ is a work of extraordinary grace, one whose magisterial beauty is eclipsed only by its humility. Adolpho Veloso’s expansive frames and Bryce Dressner’s score intertwine to create a work of profound reverberations. Initially you might be restless with its sedateness, sturdy ponderousness. Allow it to wash over you. It’s a calming and life-affirming gem.
Debanjan Dhar is covering Sundance Film Festival 2025 as part of the accredited press.
