- Train Dreams
- Directed by: Clint Bentley
- Starring: Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones
- Drama/Period | PG-13 | 1 hr 42 min
- 4.5 stars
- Where to Watch: Streaming on Netflix
The Sundance Film Festival has produced “buzzy” dramas for decades, popularized by 2006’s breakout, Little Miss Sunshine, and punctuated by 2021’s Best Picture-winning CODA. Sometimes these films deserve the hype, and sometimes they’re unbearably oversentimental. This year’s awards heavyweight out of Sundance, Train Dreams, a strikingly beautiful film about experiencing life, thankfully falls in the former camp.
There’s a fine line between affecting sincerity and noticeable oversentimentality—a film that steps over is invariably a film that tries too hard. Train Dreams doesn’t do that, and it’s a wonderful lesson in how restraint, especially in writing, often produces a better result. The film follows Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), a logger operating in the Pacific Northwest during America’s rapid westward expansion in the early 20th century. Specifically, it focuses on how Robert experiences the world—physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually—not through big, showy conversations, but by simply showing how Robert reacts.
Robert hardly says two sentences about his feelings, which makes perfect sense considering he’s a logger living in the early 1900s, but that’s what makes Train Dreams so special. Those words aren’t needed thanks to the film’s incredible work showing, not telling. It’s evident in Robert’s body language when he finally gets home to his wife, Gladys (Felicity Jones), and their baby girl after a long, hard logging season; in the way Robert physically experiences grief, loss, frustration, and depression following traumatic events, both on the road and at home; and in the way he interacts with other people (and a few dogs) along the way. He feels so fully realized (thanks in no small part to Edgerton, who gives an amazing performance), and his experience is undeniable.
All that writing restraint also allows the gorgeous cinematography to shine through, and I doubt there’s a single still image from Train Dreams that wouldn’t look good framed on a wall. The score is brilliant, too, and it all comes together to replicate what it feels like to live a life and make sense of it. To that point, Train Dreams is devastatingly sad at times, but that’s also why it’s so beautiful. Life inevitably includes pain, suffering, and loss, but life also inevitably includes joy, happiness, and acceptance. Choosing to live doesn’t mean choosing when, where, or how to experience those things—it means choosing to accept the experience.
That’s Robert’s path, and that’s what the title, taken from Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella from which the film is adapted, invokes. You don’t get to choose what kind of dreams pop up after drifting off to sleep aboard a slow, meandering train—those dreams just happen, and they don’t discriminate as to which memories from which the dreams flow. Train Dreams is interested in what memories from Robert’s life reveal themselves in those quiet, lonely moments, and it asks its audience to consider the same.
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