‘Train Dreams’ Review: Joel Edgerton Mines Depth, Beauty and Sadness From an Ordinary Life in Ravishing Contemplation of Man and Nature

The passage of time is somehow both fluid and jagged in Clint Bentley’s soulful film of the Denis Johnson novella, Train Dreams. It flows or ambles or bumps along, passing over moments of joy, shock, discovery, lonesomeness or devastating sadness, but just as often over seemingly mundane experiences that only later reveal their significance when we look back. The cumulative weight of all those moments that make up an ordinary life is the subject of this elegiac macro-miniaturist portrait of an itinerant worker in the early 1900s Pacific Northwest, played by Joel Edgerton in what might be the best work of his career.

Novelistic yet never page-bound, the story is shaped by superb acting and finely etched characters that seem to have been lifted from a long-ago time, with faces right out of a Walker Evans catalogue; by gifted cinematographer Adolpho Veloso’s painterly eye for compositions and calm, graceful camerawork — shot in the snug 3:2 aspect ratio; by a cascading Bryce Dessner score that ranges across many moods; and by Will Patton’s enthralling third-person narration.

In the hands of a less skilled director, the reams of voiceover might have been cumbersome, but there’s a soothing conversational rhythm to the transfixing prose that pulls us in from the outset.

Bentley’s affecting 2021 debut, Jockey, sat firmly on the shoulders of Clifton Collins Jr., who makes a brief appearance here. The director’s second feature — a grand leap in scope and accomplishment and a shift into a more classical form — is anchored throughout by Edgerton’s performance as Robert Grainier, a taciturn man given to thoughtful observation of a rapidly transforming world and his place in it. Grainier is the actor’s most rewarding, emotionally layered role since Jeff Nichols’ tender interracial marriage drama, Loving.

Bentley co-wrote the script with his creative partner of more than a decade, Greg Kwedar, just as they did on Jockey and on Kwedar’s Sing Sing, for which the collaborators currently are nominated for an adapted screenplay Oscar.

Without being slavishly faithful to the source material, Bentley and Kwedar have really listened to the cadences and undertones of Johnson’s writing, in both its intimacy and its amplitude, its spare simplicity and its plain-spoken expressiveness. That attention to nuance gets the film closer to the spirit of the novelist, poet and short story author than his previous screen adaptations — Alison Maclean’s Jesus’ Son and Claire Denis’ Stars at Noon.

With characteristic narrative economy, the movie opens with a short recap of Robert’s early life. Orphaned at a young age, he was adopted and raised in Idaho, without ever learning what became of his biological parents. The sense of a person coming from nowhere has poignant echoes in the concluding scenes.

But the larger point, beyond just dust to dust, is made by Claire (the brilliant Kerry Condon), a well-traveled forestry services worker Robert meets in his later years. “The world’s an old place,” she says, gesturing back to a distant past in which the entire area was under a glacier. Her extensive knowledge of history and geography doesn’t exclude a sense of wonder at the fact that every plant, animal or human has both a place and a connection. “A hermit in the woods is as important as a preacher in a pulpit,” she tells him, acknowledging his chosen solitary life but also the value of his existence.

His years spent going from one forest logging job to another, pairing up with other sawyers to fell giant spruces, yield marvelous vignettes of wilderness frontier life. Incisively drawn characters might be around for just a short scene or two but they leave a memorable impression. In those aspects Train Dreams recalls Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow.

Robert mostly keeps to himself, observing the behavior and mulling over the words of others, often finding gentle humor. Among his fellow loggers is a silent man (Chuck Tucker) whom Robert hears speak just once, when he stomps off from the group grumbling about wanting to be left in peace. Then there’s the opposite extreme, Apostle Frank (Paul Schneider), a man so verbose he seems allergic to silence, though it’s eventually imposed on him in a way that’s first startling, then hilarious.

The most significant figure of Michael’s logging years is Arn Peeples (William H. Macy, at his best), an explosives expert who is generally the oldest man on each job and “always yammering.” Arn talks about the work being not only physically taxing but also rough on the soul, cutting down magnificent trees that have been there for 500 years. His words resonate against images of the changing face of denuded mountains, pointing up a key theme now more relevant than ever — the cost to nature of man’s progress.

Arn is a fellow both spiritual and philosophical. Given how the names and faces keep changing with every logging crew, he tells Robert that he views any second encounter as a blessing. In simple but eloquent words, he acknowledges that when something is taken from nature, then nature will take something back. “A tree can be a friend,” he muses. “But as soon as you put in a blade in it, then you have a war on your hands.”

One of Arn’s few friends and one of the other rare older men still working on logging crews is Billy (John Diehl), whose diminishing faculties are a signal to Robert to put down his saw for good.

While often seeming to focus on everyone except Robert, these glimpses of life in the pioneer years of the lumber industry give us real insight into the protagonist. Even more revealing is his one regrettable experience working with a railroad gang, building a bridge over a 60-foot-deep gorge that became known as the Eleven-Mile Cutoff Bridge, so named for the long curve of land it eliminated on the Spokane train line.

It’s on this job that he sees a Chinese sawyer (Alfred Hsing) being brutally hauled off for an unknown offense, which echoes the brutality he witnessed as a child when Chinese immigrants were subjected to mass deportation — another plot point with present-day parallels. Bentley’s handling of the bridge incident differs from Johnson’s in the book, showing Robert as more of a humanist in an experience that nonetheless will come to haunt him. The director could be accused of making all the principal characters too virtuous, but his love for them is part of the movie’s restorative balm.

In among all these itinerant jobs, Robert meets Gladys (Felicity Jones), a young woman who sings in the church choir and becomes the incandescent center of his life. Scenes in which he proposes, and they mark out with stones the site of a cabin they plan to build by a river, are some of the movie’s loveliest moments. A gorgeous role that Jones fully fleshes out in relatively limited screen time, Gladys is neither mousy nor prim, but a smart, resourceful woman who can hunt, fish and mesmerize Robert with just the sound of her voice. She knows a lot about life, her intuitive thought process a source of fascination to him.

Robert will look back on their years in the cabin, where they raise a young daughter, as the happiest time of his life. But having seen much violence and death in his years as a logger, he’s tormented by the sense that darkness is following him around and some kind of punishment is coming his way. Along with profound love, Michael also experiences crushing sorrow, which radically reshapes the remaining years of his life. He finds solace for a time in the friendship and generosity of Native American storekeeper Ignatius Jack (Nathaniel Arcand, wonderful), but that, too, comes to an unhappy end.

Not that Train Dreams is about misery and suffering. Sure, it’s about poleaxing tragedy that knocks the stuffing out of a person, creating a void likely never to be filled. But there’s also noble resilience in its depiction of solitude, a strange kind of comfort in its rapturous melancholy and companionship in the voices of the dead. It’s about all the infinite pieces, large and small, that make up the mosaic of a life, embodied in Edgerton’s performance with such a bottomless well of feeling that you wonder how the actor walked away from the set each day not completely destroyed.

At the risk of gushing, I adored this perfectly formed movie. It elevates Bentley into the league of essential American filmmakers.