There’s a certain type of movie one comes to expect from Sundance: a spare but beautifully filmed family drama featuring a reticent protagonist in an evocative rural setting, favoring quietness to the point of remoteness such that it doesn’t quite deliver on its emotional potential. At first glance, Train Dreams, starring Joel Edgerton as a devoted family man and isolated loner in the early 20th-century logging business, seems like it will fall into the trap of stale airiness. At times it does, too maddeningly fascinated with the experience of rustic isolation and too reliant on the unsaid or assumed. Like fellow Sundance premiere Omaha, Train Dreams compensates for a terse male lead with the grand, rapturously filmed scenery of the US west – in this case, the lush and primordial forests of northern Idaho and Washington.
Luckily, one cannot get enough of these beastly woods, so towering and teeming with life, and so rapaciously plundered by the American appetite for industry. At its best, writer/director Clint Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar have crafted a gorgeous and poignant film of quiet, bruised life in a fragile place, anchored by a magnificently sensitive and restrained performance from the still-underrated Edgerton.
Bentley and Kwedar have switched roles here from their last project, the critically acclaimed 2024 drama Sing Sing, a radically empathetic and ethically made film on a theater program within the titular prison. As with that film, Train Dreams is lusciously filmed, sensitively acted and focused on life after irrevocable rupture. The world here is again cutthroat and viciously racist. An early scene depicts Robert Grainier (Edgerton), a orphan raised in Bonners Ferry, Idaho, who makes a meager living as a logger, as a compatriot of Chinese laborers so often employed and abused in the construction of US railroads; he watches helplessly as a mob randomly throws one such work friend off a bridge, one of several pops of shocking violence that convincingly characterizes a time just slightly removed from the wild west.
That man, who never speaks or has a name, haunts Robert for the rest of the film, a foreboding face in his nightmares. For Robert, as a narrator explains in voiceover presumably drawn from Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella (critical, as the dialogue for these hardened men and two women aren’t going to give you much), is convinced that something terrible was following him, that a debt was to be paid.
But for the first third of the film, the mood is dewy-eyed and romantic, as Robert finds the one person he can speak to in Gladys (Felicity Jones, sporting a distractingly old-timey accent). Jones and Edgerton breezily convey the warm, heady intimacy of two people deeply in love, as the couple build an idyllic rural life worthy of a country song, had the year not been 1917 – an acre in the wilderness, some chickens, a cabin of their own and an adorable child. These are scenes of almost too-glossy bucolic bliss, not helped by the fact that Jones consistently plays Alice with the idealized patience, vague lustfulness and overemphasis of one of Robert’s reveries, even in real time.
It is not all swooning; Robert must make a living in the woods, which gives the film its foreboding edge and bursts of humor, though almost entirely through the colorful performance of William H Macy as a loquacious dynamite specialist. When the rupture does come, it is heart-rending, unfortunately pertinent and unbelievable, as tragedy often is. The remainder of the film takes on an at times frustratingly meditative quality, waiting with Robert as he heals in small, terribly difficult steps. Edgerton shines the brightest in these moments, never less than fully believable as a man so clobbered by grief that he is never short on emotion but mostly beyond words.
Edgerton’s performance hinges on subtle shifts and wordless communication, fine details that allow the film’s long silences to work. (Though it is still a relief when Kerry Condon’s Claire, a surveyor for the US Forest Service, arrives for two much-needed conversations.) Yet Train Dreams takes big swings at sweeping emotions and themes – literally, at one point, addressing the sum of one’s years on Earth – that belie a bald earnestness at the heart of the project, a heart that is admirable if not always stirring. Instead, it’s the smaller threads in this tale of a man’s life that deliver the emotional punches: the stubborn regrowth of lost trees, the loyalty of a good dog, the knowing visits from a shopkeeper in town (Nathaniel Arcand) that I wish got twice as much screentime.
These details, vividly captured by cinematographer Adolpho Veloso, access an unspoken wonder essential to the film’s overarching message of healing and connectedness. The forest, as Claire says, is a living, breathing, tenuous thing, each small part necessary for its balance and survival. Many a Sundance drama strives for such weightiness, and though Train Dreams may not have its ecosystem in perfect alignment, it hits enough to surpass expectations.
Train Dreams is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
