Time takes on a different tenor in Train Dreams, in which the life of an early 20th-century logger in Idaho both flits by in a blink and makes an eternal mark. Based on a Denis Johnson novella, the movie leans heavily on voiceover narration drawn from that text (gently delivered by Will Patton) and less on the performance by Joel Edgerton as the soft-spoken, hard-working Robert Grainier (though Edgerton manages to build a whole man mostly from “hmms” and “mmms”). Director Clint Bentley, who wrote the script with Greg Kwedar, emphasizes the larger flow of Grainier’s experience in this wild, wonderful, casually violent time and place. (The score, by Bryce Dessner, and editing, by Parker Laramie, work hand in hand here, seamlessly carrying us from one rooted reverie to the next.) If Terrence Malick has already come to mind, it’s no slight to call Train Dreams “starter Malick.” Compared to the likes of The Tree of Life and The New World, the narrative here is more linear, the voiceover is more explanatory, the characters are more readable, and the Christian resonance is far more slight (if evident at all). Yet the movie intriguingly reaches—formally and philosophically—in those directions. With Felicity Jones as Grainier’s wife and William H. Macy as an old-timer/forest sage who works alongside Grainier for a time. “It upsets a man’s soul whether you recognize it or not,” he says of cutting down 500-year-old trees. Train Dreams, in less than two hours, manages to evoke the weight of Grainier’s 80-some years, and more.
(11/22/2025)
