Train Dreams

TRAIN DREAMS   ***

Clint Bentley

2025

IDEA:  A logger in the Pacific Northwest experiences love, brutality, and loss over several decades in the 20th century.

BLURB:  Grandness is nestled within the granular in Train Dreams, which conveys the inexorable passage of time and the toll of modernization through the prism of one man’s unexceptional existence. In just about 100 minutes, it channels some 80 years of personal and national history by homing in on the interstices. It’s these in-between moments that comprise the life of Robert Grainier, who drifts on the fringes of the industrial progress to which he contributes but sees little profit from. He’s as rootless as one of his newly felled trees, if not as old; history and nature happen around him, and he can be nothing more than a guilty witness to the former’s sins and a subject of the latter’s indifference. Joel Edgerton is incredibly moving as Grainier, even with the dubious aging makeup (or lack thereof). With his hangdog face and soulful, deep-set eyes, he imbues the character with a painful existential solitude that is in turn heightened by Will Patton’s Godlike narration of his life. But we are always reminded of the splendor in his world, and DP Adolpho Veloso captures it with palpable reverence, his camera gazing up at swaying old-growth trees or soaking in golden sunlight, perched by a warm fireside or showing family play against the yellow-purple hues of dusk. Bentley and Kwedar can’t resist some trite verbalizing of this sublimity, and the life-before-your-eyes montages are laid on rather thick in the final third. Still, Train Dreams is gorgeous and affecting, a requiem for, and hushed acceptance of, the transience of all things.