Train Dreams review: Dir. Clint Bentley

Clint Bentley’s drama is as satisfying slice of American history writ small as you’re ever likely to encounter, anchored by performances from Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones that are as achingly exquisite as the film they inhabit…

Train Dreams is a film of shades: shades of a Western, shades of Terrence Malick, and shades of melancholy, wistfulness and beauty. Clint Bentley’s meandering drama is as satisfying slice of American history writ small as you’re ever likely to encounter, anchored by performances from Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones that are almost as achingly exquisite as the film they inhabit.

Bentley and screenwriter Greg Kwedar have developed a fruitful partnership, having collaborated on Transpecos, Jockey and, most prominently, Sing Sing, their prison musical drama. Sharing writing duties while alternating in the director’s chair – this time it’s Bentley’s turn with the visuals and they’ve adapted Denis Johnson’s novella, a story that charts the life of an American logger and his attempts to provide a life for his family.

While the non-linear structure rambles through the experiences and memories of Robert Grainier (Edgerton), half-remembered memories surfacing in the order they’re recalled rather than experienced, they’re woven together by a narration from Will Patton. Less of an inner monologue for the pensive, often observant Grainier is more of an audience guide through the fractured experiences that make up the labourer’s existence, and Patton’s narration helps to set the overall tone, even as it glides up and down the emotional spectrum.

Core to the film are two brief encounters, which both have lasting effects on Grainier in different ways. The first is his meet-cute with Gladys (Jones), a mutual and immediate affection developing into love, marriage and a daughter. Grainier’s manual work requires him to spend long stretches on the road, making the time spent at the cabin he’s crafted for Gladys all the more special. He’s conflicted between the need to provide for them and to experience the joys of life with them, looking to find ways to balance those mutually exclusive objectives.

The other is an occasion while working near a train line. A Chinese worker is accused of stealing, and Robert initially tries to help pin him down. But justice in this world is swift, brutal and unquestioning, the immigrant being almost immediately cast to his death from a nearby bridge on the line. Robert is unable to shake the image of the dead man, seeing him in his dreams and eventually questioning his own morality and sanity after not being able to intercede on his behalf.

It’s one of a series of brief but dramatic episodes of violence or their aftermath that categorise Robert’s life in rural America in the 1920s and 30s. While others, from Robert offering water to a dying man from his boot, to a man injured by the death of a family member meting out clinical retribution to another of Grainier’s co-workers, could cause you to be forgiven for thinking this was a Western transposed to the forests, the flashbacks and forwards in time also chart the inexorable progress into the modern era, a life that gradually becomes safer but where mechanisation threatens to turn Grainier into an irrelevance.

Along the road he meets a collection of other characters, including the craggy explosives expert Arn Peeples (William H. Macy), overly chatty logger Apostle Frank (Paul Schneider), a storekeeper who looks out for him in his hour of need called Ignatius Jack (Nathaniel Arcand) and a forestry services worker (Kerry Condon) with whom he muses on the vagaries of life. It’s a pleasure to shamble alongside these people who Grainier meets along his travels, each of them shaping his outlook on the world as it shifts beneath his feet, sometimes subtly and at others catastrophically.

Train Dreams is a patchwork quilt of a man’s life, thrown over a country’s history. Those patches cover a wide range of a human life, both at the most joyous and most painful ends and of so many oddities in between. That Bentley captures the joy of experiences such as the growth of his daughter and spending time with his wife feels easy on the surface, but it’s testament to both Edgerton and Jones that they sell the transition from first meeting to married couple so effectively. But Edgerton in particular also has to bear the pain of grief and loss, so inextricably part of that human experience, and in one single shot of Edgerton lying prone on the floor, immobilised by grief, Train Dreams says more about the vacuum create by loss than many films can in their entire runtime.

The ramshackle, frontier nature of Grainier’s early existence and he and his family’s life in a secluded cabin may offer ‘Western’ comparisons, but so much of the rest of Train Dreams seems to be inhabited by the aesthetic and themes of Terrence Malick. The fact that this shares similar preoccupations to much of Malick’s filmography would be one thing, but Alphonso Veloso’s lush, golden hour photography and the choices of slightly low camera angles all feel in subtle but reverent homage. But, despite its non-linear structure and piecemeal nature, Train Dreams positively throbs with life, celebrating existence and eventually finding peace through simple pleasures among the other challenges life has to offer.

With Sing Sing and now Train Dreams, Bentley and Kwedar are proving themselves to be filmmakers not only of talent but versatility, and Train Dreams is testament to their varied talents behind the camera, offering a delightful, poignant and profound examination of a country and the people that made it.