JOEL EDGERTON IN TRAIN DREAMS

Welcome to hard times

This is a restrained and atmospheric but unnecessarily dreary film from the team of Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar. Sometimes one has done the directing, sometimes the other. This time Kwedar did the adaptation of the much admired novella of Denis Johnson for this film and Bentley directed. Bentley directed Jockey (related to the career of his own father, apparently). This time he goes further afield from family experience, writing about a laborer in the woods of the Northwest early in the last century, who lives on to the early Sixties in, apparently, continual loneliness and poverty. He loses his little family tragically many years earlier and never recovers from the grief. Nor does the film. The images have an austere beauty of outdoor green and blue and light through the woods whose restraint is underlined by use of square Academy format and 35mm projection. Solid. Old style.

Bradshaw calls Train Dreams "lovely looking, deeply felt" and remarks a stylistic debt to Terrence Malick and the Malick-influenced early work of David Gordon Green - which shows in low camera positions, sunset-hour (and contre-jour, i.e. into the light) compositions, narrative voice overs, and (as Bradshaw puts it) "epiphanically revealed glories of the American landscape." Robert is part of an exploited itinerant labour force in the early 20th century clearing forest wildernesses, building bridges, above all making way for the great American railroads that were crossing the country and building great financial empires for the entrepreneurs and families behind them. But that is a drama that happens far from the events here.

Much depends on the solid figure of Australian actor Joel Edgerton, the durable thespian who was a part of the extraordinary Animal Kingdom in 2010. He plays Denis Johnson's Everyman Robert Grainier, a nobody who strives out in the woods when the great railroads are being built across this country. But we don't get a picture of that, only a rough wood bridge or two, and the chopping down of lots of trees. Chinese workers are seen. The brutal elimination of one is glimpsed, but most of the "Oriental" workers hardly emerge as more than foreign faces, with not a word spoken by one. A notable exception is the trader Fu Sheng (Alfred Hsing) with whom Robert becomes friendly, a connection lasting for years. This is not a story of dialogue, or reading. Robert dropped out of school early. Robert mentions working for two months with one (presumably white?) coworker without a single word passing between them.

Robert comes from nobody and has no family, does not know quite when he was born. He acquires a wife, Gladys (the soulful Felicity Jones), and they have a child and acquire a dog that can sit, stay, lay, and follow the other standard commands. We may learn more about the dog than the child. Sadly, Robert must spend most of his time away from their little woods cottage - an idyllic-seeming place - to work on seasonal or temporary jobs that pay four dollar a day, minus the employer's expenses. At this rate it is hard to get ahead, but Robert hopes to buy horses and build a sawmill. Nonetheless Robert reports that an early time with his little family of pinched finances turns out to be the happiest period of his life.

The dreams of the title are sometimes that, sometimes premonitions of the future, memories of the past, yearnings for an alternative present. A great fire leaves Robert forever after unable to do other than dream, and pine for what was once but cannot come again. How these are train dreams is not clear. Perhaps there is a flourish or an accent in the Denis Johnson book that Kwedar and Bentley have left out. In the absence of the docudrama element that gave Jockey a vivid texture, Train Dreams might have used more narrative complexity. My subtitle, "Welcome to hard times," is a wistful allusion to E.L. Doctorow's debut novel, where events unfold, in a similar early American world, with dazzling rapidity and surprise. But that is not the Malickian way. This is a film of contemplative mood, a wavelength I didn't get onto. If you do, it may work its magic for you as it has for the many critics whose acclaim has led Variety recently to name this film a dark horse best picture Oscar contender.

Train Dreams, 102 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 26, 2025, showing also at many other festivals including Toronto, Deauville, Woodstock, Rio, Vancouver, Mill Valley, BFI London, and AFI. US theatrical limited release from Nov. 7, 2025. Coming on Netflix Nov. 21. Watched on the big screen at El Cerrito Rialto Nov. 16. Metacritic rating: 87%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.