Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) is a transient laborer, serving as a railway man and logger, working in the forests of the Pacific northwest in the early years of the 1900s.  His work keeps him far from home and for long periods of time, but his wife, Gladys (Felicity Jones), is one of the few constants in this man’s life, and she brings out a softness in him that lets him see the world in a new light. 

Clint Bentley directs Train Dreams, adapting Denis Johnson’s novella of the same name with Greg Kwedar assisting on the page.  The 102 minute film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival where it was one of the buzzier acquisitions by Netflix who held the film from general audiences until placing it on their platform in the pre-Thanksgiving frame.  Ahead of that, the distributor sent the title to many of the regional fall film festivals where Edgerton’s performance was oft lauded. 

While Edgerton graces almost every frame of A Roll in the film, he is a man of few words so the progression of the story is narrated to us in voiceover by Will Patton.  His narration is specifically not in the voice of Robert, and it takes the form almost like the telling of a folk tale treating this man who built the infrastructure that made America with an air of importance and reverence that would otherwise not be afforded to him.  Now, Train Dreams my not be a biopic in the traditional sense as there is no singular Robert Grainer in the annals of history, but the idea of that man is what this film chronicles.  In this way, the film feels akin to the earlier works of Robert Eggers in so far as the thesis of the work is more the specificity of time and place.  Whereas Eggers would then use the lens of horror to shape his narrative, Bently’s film remains much looser; a stream of consciousness tale, rambled on around a campfire by an old timer to anyone who would have the courtesy to listen. 

This structure fits the film so perfectly, as it allows the narrative to open up for a wide and eccentric ensemble cast who can simply come in and fill their role, then leave as simply as they entered.  Since we are just being conferred to the highlights of Robert’s life, there is little need for extended interstitial material that charts him closely across the decades of narrative time we spend with him, but instead we can simply enjoy all of the interpersonal payoffs of the various relationships this man forged across his life.  With principal casting led by Avy Kaufman, and Nike Imoru expanding the ensemble with local talent, the world of the film is a true melting pot; the exact kind of union which the United States of America was founded on.   

To digress a moment here, since Train Dreams is still very much a story about colonialism and expansionism, there is not much time spent overtly examining our responsibility as stewards of stolen land, but the film never feels blatantly disrespectful, either.  It views Robert as a man fulfilling his duty – answering the call to make his country a greater place – and because it is a story about the everyman and not one about the railroad or the lumber tycoons, there is a noble sense about it.  Each frame bursts with the lush, verdant greens of the forest and the crip, clean blues of the sky; colors fit for these pioneering kings of their own making and each vibrantly captured by Adolpho Veloso’s lens.  Veloso photographs these landscapes with such reverence that the towering trees are like the archways of a great cathedral, and while Train Dreams does not extend far enough past its narrative station to show the all-conquering powers of man against himself and of nature, each thundering fall of these mighty trees may very well be a hammer beating a nail into our species’ coffin.  Sure, it is just one tree in the same way that Robert is just one man, but so too is a solider just one boy called from his home and given a tool of destruction to serve a master he will never meet. 

Returning to the point at hand, the casting, Kaufman and Imru’s joint effort adds great texture to the story and it lends credence to the overall tone of the film.  Again, Train Dreams never presents itself as a singular biopic, but it is seeking to give a voice to the thousands, if not millions, of forgotten people that came here striving to start a life of their own, and life has a funny way of leading people in and out of experiences and other’s lives.  For Robert, life leads him to intersect with characters such as Fu Sheng (Alfred Hsing), Apostle Frank (Paul Schneider), and Arn Peeples (William H. Macy).  Macy is the runaway star as the explosions expert with some of the most energy of anyone else on screen and he perfectly balances the performance so that he does not become too cartoonish in an otherwise grounded world while still acting as a live wire. The film comes alive when we are with him, and his absence is sorely felt as Edgerton’s lackadaisical floating across the frame to Patton’s narration is a real struggle to stay invested in. 

While the male cast features a robust bench, the female cast have considerably less to do, but tonally their presence over the narrative even when not on screen helps to be a foil to the rugged wilderness where much of the action – a word used rather liberally here – takes place.  First is Jones’ Gladys, and while her influence and the way she is framed does not completely reduce her to just another thankless wife role, it is not too far off from it.  She helps reenforce the poetic nature laten in Robert who just does not always have the vocabulary necessary to express it, but instead we get to see those verses play out wordlessly on screen as he builds first a home and then a family with Gladys.  It is because of this that her eventual loss in a forest fire is so deeply felt because narratively, it is tragic, but tonally, her absence scars the film in the same way is scars Robert’s existence; notably, however, it is not enough to calcify either the film or Robert.  We do not immediately notice those scars, not until late in the film when Robert meets Claire (Kerry Condon), a forest worker on fire watch.  In much the same way that Robert is haunted across the film by Fu Sheng, Claire too feels almost like a cosmic apparition albeit this time one of forgiveness and growth. Her station represents a growing understanding of the environment and how we must live within instead of above nature, and her soft, compassionate tone is in stark opposition to tone of the gruff new age loggers with their roaring, sputtering, and smoking chainsaws. Not all innovation is bad. 

The film could have begun to wind down here, but instead it reaches out into some jarring territory that undermines much of what it was building towards.  As the years progress and technology continues across all fields to emerge and evolve, Robert one day decides that he will fly in a biplane.  To see him above the trees which he once walked among simply feels wrong.  Patton’s narration does what it can to help tie this up poetically enough, and thanks to his dulcet tones we go along with the conceit easily enough, but it is such a weak, waved-off ending and almost an abandonment of who we know Robert to be.  Sure, people can be surprising especially when faced with their own mortality, and the film cannot ignore these advances towards modern comfort – in fact, seeing the decline of the rail industry is one of the more intriguing aspects of seeing Robert in his older years – but Robert’s sudden determination to have mastery over his life in this way, as cruel as it is to say it, does not align with who we understand him to be and the film does little to show us what changed in him.  Without that support on the page and allowing him to be a little more fleshed out and realized over the preceding pages, his hero moment, simple as it may be, would have been so much more impactful.  Oddly enough, as well as Patton does in the narration, denying us that true interiority to Robert is the film’s ultimate undoing. 

The too-airy narrative aside, Train Dreams is still a visual accomplishment that lulls audiences in for something unique as it makes the mundane momentous.  With a little more shape to it, the film could have cemented itself into the ranks of quiet, expansionist epics à la Jan Troell’s The New Land (1972) which follows the plight of a Swedish farmer and his family adapting to a changing America in the mid-1800s.  Both stories are rich with experience and track a life well lived, but Troell’s story – and, to be fair, it is almost twice as long and the direct sequel to the three times as long The Emigrants (1971) – takes a much more literal shape than anything which Bentley is doing here.  While everything from the cinematography, to Parker Laramie’s edit, and Bryce Dessner’s score work in favor with this tone poem he penned with Kwedar, there just are not enough words on the page here, even despite the extensive voice over, to really make this the overwhelming work of sensory immersing art that it is so close to achieving.  We can feel the damp moss against our skin and there is a heaviness in the air that fills our lungs even while we watch this from the comfort of our homes, but Robert remains just too far away, cloaked in the mist that lays on the forest floor, so that a fuller understanding of Train Dreams, much like the understanding our own dreams upon waking up, is just out of our grasp as the morning sun eats away at the dew and brings with it the challenge of a new day ahead.