Film Review: Train Dreams

5 Stars

If the January snowstorms have you hibernating at home and looking for meaningful distractions (and if, like me, you appreciate a soft-spoken but profoundly moving cinematic journey), this critic highly recommends you clear a little time, make yourself a hot toddy, and cuddle up for the magnificent drama Train Dreams, now streaming on Netflix after a brief theatrical run last year.

Train Dreams is a lyrical and patient story that follows the highs and lows within one man’s brief life as he struggles to make sense of love, loss, and our complex human condition. Far from being existential and academic, the film sometimes roars with intense energy even as it holds moments so quiet and tender, you may hear your own breath.

For fans of successful literary adaptations, Train Dreams is one of those rare synergies between the written word and the magic of cinema, and it blends together the best of both formats into something unique and precious. Published by writer Denis Johnson as a short story in The Paris Review starting in 2002, it was adapted into a novella and published again in 2011, eventually becoming a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in a year the committee famously deadlocked and failed to issue the award to anyone.

Over a decade later, filmmaker and director Clint Bentley would adapt the story yet again, working with screenwriter Greg Kwedar to bring the turn-of-the-century romance of words into images, and the result has been a haunting and powerful success earning awards buzz for the many talents involved.

A sprawling portrait of times and places, Train Dreams begins after the dawn of the 20th century with men cutting lumber with crosscut saws, and ends after astronauts are standing on the moon decades later; illuminating both the powerful longevity and temporality of the universe at the same time.

In plot, the story is elegantly simple as we follow the pedestrian day laborer and logger Robert Grainier, who begins as a drifter of sorts with no fulfilling future. When he unexpectedly finds love and a family with his wife, Gladys, the new husband and father begins to feel a change within (or it is revealed to him by nature, depending on your interpretation).

When a tragic event derails everything he has worked so hard for and costs him everything he has loved in his life, Grainier is forced to exist alone and find meaning in his own hermetic isolation—a perfect metaphor of the human condition and one that I think will resonate deeply with any engaged viewer.

Led with true conviction by actor Joel Edgerton as Grainier, along with supporting performances from the fiercely talented Felicity Jones as Gladys and legend William H. Macy as a philosophical wanderer drifting in and out of Grainier’s life, Train Dreams delivers some genuine acting craft that carries you away.

In a poetic turn as a narrator we never see, Will Patton joins the ranks of such other notable voice-overs as Robert Redford in A River Runs Through It or Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption.

With gorgeous and imaginative cinematography, a restrained score, and moments of silent power you’ll find yourself remembering, this 1 hour and 42 minute experience will have you rethinking the physical and natural world we live in…and what matters most.

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