Of all the cinematic protagonists in 2025, you aren’t going to find many easier to warm to than Train Dreams’s Robert Grainier (as played by Joel Edgerton). The quiet, kind, and soulful central force around which this oh-so-gentle quasi-Western epic revolves, he’s simply a peaceful person to be around, perfectly fitting for this gorgeous and sweet but also *too* understated film that adapts and expands on Denis Johnson’s novella. Following Robert’s entire life in Idaho and the Pacific Northwest from the late 19th Century to 1968, it’s a study of colossal national change and how one man might stay the same even as the rest of his country heads from the dirt to the moon.
Within this epic, near-century sweep, director Clint Bentley and writer Greg Kwedar (the duo who brought us Sing Sing last year but with directing and writing duties reversed), mostly hone in on the late 1910s, as a new wave of American expansionism coincides with World War 1 to boom business in the Northwest. Robert is a logger, clearing away vast swathes of ancient forests to make room for towns or provide lumber to the war effort, a job that pays well but keeps him away from his loving wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) and their rapidly growing infant daughter, all while the destruction of nature rests uneasy on his soul.
There is grandeur and tragedy in all of DP Adolpho Veloso’s shots of America’s wondrous but shrinking natural world, verdant greenery almost growing right out of the screen in the forests while the clearings have skies that stretch forever. Train Dreams is due to come to Netflix but, if you’re going to check it out at all, catch in its two-week cinema run prior to streaming – this is a film to be seen and heard on a big screen, the enrapturing effects of its nature enough to overcome its minimal story in a cinema, but likely not on a laptop.
Bentley and Kwedar keep the emotional register exceptionally quiet, even in the moments where death and destruction arrive in Robert’s life. The result is a film that just rather washes over you, never boring but never thrilling either, the most dramatic moments typically coming in simple fireside chats in the wilderness, the orange flames lighting the men against the infinite black of a pre-light pollution nighttime. Edgerton, who is rarely not on the screen, turns out to be well suited to this, making Robert stoic instead of just quiet and imbuing him with genuine curiosity about the world around him.
Jones, by the nature of the role, has less to do, but is still affecting, while William H Macy is a standout as an ageing and philosophical dynamite expert who Robert runs in to on a variety of jobs. The real star of Train Dreams, though, is consistently the American country itself (shot for real on location in Washington State), a blighted-but-stunning wonderland honoured in unhurried fashion in one of the year’s softest films.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 