Train Dreams review: Joel Edgerton brings Denis Johnsons novella to life

By no means a fast-paced film but one rich with detail and strong performances, Train Dreams weaves one man’s life through a rapidly changing American West in the early 20th century.

Based on Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella of the same name, it’s a steady, meditative, and at times devastating journey with many a conversation around the fire. Train Dreams sees Sing Sing collaborators Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley reunite — this time with Bentley in the director’s chair — to explore delicate themes of love and loss amid this fading frontier, sitting on the cusp of industrialisation. It’s a slow-going, sombre film at times, an historical essay at others, and it won’t be everyone’s cup of sarsaparilla.

However, the true heart of this moving film is a subtle, sensitive performance by Joel Edgerton, one immersed in Bryce Dessner’s meticulous score and Adolpho Veloso’s lush cinematography, and concluded with the unmistakable spirit of Nick Cave.

What is Train Dreams about?

Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones in “Train Dreams.”
Credit: Courtesy of Netflix

Beginning in 1917 and running through to 1968, Train Dreams follows a man’s search for meaning as the 20th century arrives. The Wild West days are over. The American frontier is transforming. And Edgerton leads as devoted family man and stoic railroad worker Robert Grainier, who works for the Spokane International Railway in Idaho. He builds transient bonds with his fellow lumberjacks and pines for home. He’s also a man riddled by guilt for his complicity watching the racist murder of a Chinese immigrant worker during a railroad job, perpetually haunted by the memory. Here, the script diverges from the novella: In the latter, Robert physically helps in hauling the worker to a tall bridge, but in the film, Robert simply doesn’t intervene.

Despite this shockingly casual event, the film spends most of its time tracing Robert’s life. After a brief courtship with his soon-to-be wife Gladys Olding (Felicity Jones), in the small village of Meadow Creek, Robert builds a simple, idyllic home with her among fields of wildflowers and beside a babbling brook. The pair map out their single-room cabin with river boulders and soon welcome the arrival of their daughter Kate. It’s an almost overwhelmingly romantic existence, hammered home in near-saccharine montages and Dessner’s tender score, and one Robert yearns for when torn away for months on dangerous railroad-building projects. The job’s perils are emphasised in both Johnson’s novella and Bentley’s film, with injury or death from the felling of colossal trees a common workplace risk for 20th-century lumberjacks. Veloso’s POV shots of these ancient giants falling prove the point, and several scenes show how risky this business of pillaging the natural landscape was.

At one tragic point, in a devastatingly shot and enacted sequence, Robert’s world is upturned forever. He’s left desperately searching for meaning in it all, feeling obsolete and expecting “a great revelation to arrive about his life.” Edgerton delivers a solemn, raw performance — and with everything that happens, we’re not mad that he’s surrounded by fluffy stray puppies for a large chunk of the film. Giving Edgerton’s character room for deep conversation and reflection, Bentley and Kwedar expand characters from Johnson’s book, including Robert’s friend Ignatius Jack (a wonderful Nathaniel Arcand), a Kootenai store owner who helps him rebuild, and forest service worker Claire (Kerry Condon), who bonds with Robert down the track.

Train Dreams is a journey of solitude and American history.

Joel Edgerton in “Train Dreams.”
Credit: Courtesy of Netflix

Though it’s not necessarily a history lesson, Train Dreams subtly meanders through stories of the American West and where these unsung railroad workers fit within it. Through an omniscient narrator (voiced by Will Patton) and conversations between characters, the script pieces together fragments of the past. As in Johnson’s novella, mentions of the American Civil War, American Indian Wars, and World War I arise organically. In particular here, William H. Macy is a highlight as Arn Peeples, a harmonica-playing explosives expert and “gadabout of unknown origin” who befriends Robert. As in the novella, Arn’s the character most reflective on American history, lamenting his younger peers’ disconnection to it.

Like Arn, Patton’s narration lends a certain grandfatherly energy, describing locomotive mechanics, the construction of the Robinson Gorge Bridge, and “the cost of progress” in the same tone as he describes Robert’s existential crisis. Nonetheless, it gives the film a steadfast emotional consistency. Additionally, his narration gives the film’s present an awareness of the future, as we learn what will become of things.

William H. Macy in “Train Dreams.”
Credit: Courtesy of Netflix

Train Dreams also takes pains to capture a specific tension between tradition and modernity through the work of production designer Alexandra Schaller. From the handcrafted elements of the Graniers’ cabin to the changing technology of the logging sites from rudimentary tools to machinery, Schaller’s team craft a detailed picture of life in the American West from early to mid century. But there’s one crucial element that pulls all the elements of Train Dreams together.

The simmering engine of Train Dreams is Bryce Dessner’s score.

Joel Edgerton and Kerry Condon in “Train Dreams.”
Credit: Courtesy of Netflix

Adding to his lauded catalogue of modern film scores from The Revenant to We Live In Time, The National’s Bryce Dessner once again flexes his atmospheric composer skills in Train Dreams. At once a whimsical, romantic ode to potential and a hypnotic, reflective accompaniment to loss, Dessner’s score drives the emotional engine of Train Dreams. Edgerton’s Robert is characteristically stoic and interior in his emotions, allowing Dessner to draw out the brilliant subtleties of his performance. Meanwhile, it’s the perfect partner to Veloso’s gorgeous shots of Robert engulfed by the Idaho landscape, immersed in the beauty and history of the American wilderness.

Worth staying through the film’s end credits for, Dessner teams up with the ever-iconic Nick Cave (no stranger to a lyrical exploration of love and loss) for the haunting original song “Train Dreams.” This brooding ballad essentially encapsulates the film’s narrative and emotional tone in a few minutes, marking a sublime conclusion to the film.

Train Dreams takes its time, relishing in conversations about grief, loss, feeling obsolete and overwhelmed by both nature and modernity. This slower pace can feel a little engulfing at times, but Edgerton’s performance, Dessner’s score, and Veloso’s balance of handheld and static photography kept me hitched on the ride.

Train Dreams was reviewed out of BFI London Film Festival. The film will hit select U.S. cinemas on Nov. 7 before streaming on Netflix worldwide on Nov. 21.

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