Where does the time go? Clint Bentley’s follow-up to 2021’s impressive but annoyingly little-seen Jockey is a moving, masterful study of a life without such measure, a working man’s blues that begins at the end of the late 19th century, just as civilization is trying to get its act together, and stops short of the moon landing in 1969. In style, Terrence Malick’s films are an obvious reference, but Train Dreams is much less abstract than that, despite its golden-hour glories and verdant views of nature in the wild. At its core, Bentley’s film is about a man trying to make sense of the tragic hand that fate has dealt him, and, finally, accepting the mystery of it all with a hard-earned, beatific grace.
Gently expounded with a God-like omniscience by an unseen narrator (Will Patton), Train Dreams takes place in a space between the then and the now, being simultaneously of the past and in the moment (Bentley plays with time in unexpected ways). At the center is Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), a logger working for the railroad companies that are steadily transforming the country. Work brings men from all over, from Shanghai to Chattanooga, a brief evocation of the American experiment that is shattered for Grainier when a Chinese worker is picked on and thrown to his death for no reason outside of racism.
Although a good man, Grainier doesn’t make a fuss, but the guilt follows him. He’s not the complaining type, content with his lot, but a chance encounter with Gladys (Felicity Jones) at a church meet changes some of that. Grainier falls for Gladys hard, and their subsequent relationship passes by in a delirium of broad strokes, unfolding moment by moment — throughout the film, time seems to exist outside the frame, which is usually tight and very intimately focused. After this, Grainier is away for weeks or months at a time, a sad fact that Gladys becomes resigned or perhaps hardened to (“No broken fingers this time?” she asks, leaving us to fill in the gaps). Grainier will only get to see their child growing up in fragments, raised in their idyllic, hand-built cabin in the woods.
Meanwhile, he’s off on the job, joined by a picaresque troupe of fellow travelers such as the man who never speaks, or the Bible freak who harbors a completely leftfield secret, or Arn Peoples (William H. Macy), a garrulous and charismatic “gadabout of unknown origin” who is both the group’s explosives expert and the oldest man on the job (it’s a testament to the quality of Bentley’s film that Macy doesn’t steal it). Arn’s earnest philosophy starts to rub off on Grainier, wondering aloud about the cosmic stitching of the universe. Tennessee Ernie Ford’s famous song comes to mind here: you load 16 tons and what do you get?
Tragedy strikes many times in this decades-spanning story, in many forms, but the defining event of Grainier’s life sees his home burned to the ground, an event that eerily prefigures the LA fires of early 2025. Grainier’s life is literally reduced to ashes, and the fate of his wife and daughter is, movingly, never resolved. Later in the film Grainier will say that that “sometimes it feels like the sadness will eat me alive” and yet also “sometimes it feels like it happened to someone else”. For the rest of its running time — and there’s a fair bit still to come — Train Dreams will walk that fine line spectacularly. It’s where it lives.
In that sense, it’s a strangely metaphysical biopic, in that it’s not about the importance of one specific life as it is about the way all lives add up in the long run, and it’s telling that it ends at a crucial moment in history, as mankind is entering the space race but not yet on the moon (at which time the hermetic Grainier doesn’t even have a landline). It’s about the things that happen to people outside these kinds of milestones, watching evolution from the sidelines, and Bentley’s film charts an unromantic and not-so-distant past that seems like it could either have sprung from a pre-electric Dylan or be a brand-new Nick Cave song just waiting to happen. (Fun fact: The wait is over, and, since its Sundance premiere, that exact, haunting song now plays over the credits.)
Like the story it tells, Train Dreams shuffles into awards season very much as an outsider, presenting itself amid the noise of bigger and starrier contenders. But its low-key focus shouldn’t be underestimated: Bentley’s film is the outlier to watch in this year’s race; a disarmingly human film about who we are, how we get to where we are, and how we survive. It’s lovely. It’s one from the heart.
Title: Train Dreams
Director: Clint Bentley
Screenwriters: Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar, from the book by Denis Johnson
Cast: Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, Clifton Collins Jr., Kerry Condon, William H. Macy
Distributor: Netflix
Running time: 1 hr 42 mins
