Film critics have been known to use the term “novelistic” as a euphemism for long but good – yet Train Dreams, an adaptation of a 2011 book by Denis Johnson, earns the accolade in an hour-and-three-quarters flat. This lyrical, consoling period piece follows a taciturn logger, Robert Grainier, played by a never-better nor more understated Joel Edgerton, who makes a life for himself out in America’s Pacific Northwest wilderness.
Some of that life is spent alone, some with the itinerant workers with whom he builds the civilising railroads, and some in a cosy cabin with his beloved wife Gladys, played with vivacity and pluck by Felicity Jones. The film’s earliest (though not first) scene takes place in the late 1800s, when the young and presumably orphaned Robert finds himself on a train to rural Idaho. Its latest (though not last) unfolds in what must be the 1960s.
Some of the best scenes entail nothing more than Edgerton playing with his and Jones’s young daughter by the river – Netflix
But the plot – if plot isn’t too strong a word for the meandering semi-narrative – skips around like a writer’s mind contemplating a blank page. There is no propulsive three-act structure underpinning it all, but rather a gentle, moment-by-moment accrual of meaning.
Some of the best scenes entail nothing more than Edgerton playing with his and Jones’s young daughter by the river, or drinking tea with Kerry Condon’s forestry worker on a veranda at sunset, or sitting under a tree opposite William H Macy, who in the role of the logging crew’s dynamite guy muses on the interconnectedness of the natural world. Nothing about it should work as a film, yet almost everything does.
William H Macy stars as explosives expert Arn Peeples – Netflix
Director Clint Bentley and his co-writer Greg Kwedar, of the superb 2023 prison drama Sing Sing, capture the plaintive beauty of Grainier’s life on the margins of 20th-century progress without hamming up the romance or laying on the grit; the airy, dappled photography is frequently stunning. Grainier’s dream life during his lengthy spells away from home reunites him with his wife and daughter, but these visions are intermingled with others of his own childhood, the landscapes and railways, and sometimes the face of a Chinese labourer he once saw thrown from a timber viaduct both men had helped build.
There’s no inherent sanctity nor holy purpose to Grainier’s existence: indeed, the film feels like something Terrence Malick might have made, but without the God stuff. Yet, in its own quiet way, it still grazes against the divine.
In selected cinemas now, then on Netflix from November 21
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
