Train Dreams

Deeply rooted in the history and natural landscape of America as well as in a soulful performance from Joel Edgerton, Clint Bentley adapts the novella by Denis Johnson into a handsome take on an ordinary life, even if it does branch towards sentimentality. Edgerton plays Robert Grainier, a logger and labourer among other things, whose small life in Idaho is given an expansive consideration.

There are no doubt those who would argue this magic-hour drenched vision of America through the 1900s is a bit too chocolate-boxy for their liking but the weight of tradition can exert an impressive pull and does so here. Even the narration, usually a characteristic that works on the page but not on film is attractive. It has the heat of a dying summer’s day inviting you to relax into it thanks to the mellifluous vocals of Will Patton, who achieves an old timer feel without dragging on the pace.

This is a story as much of the passage of time as of a single existence. We see how life grows up around Robert, just as a tree closes its bark on a boot, as he falls in love with Gladys (Felicity Jones) and they start a family, even though he is regularly forced to leave their cabin for work. Love happens casually in Train Dreams, but so does violence, whether its men turning on a worker, whose memory will haunt Robert all his days, or fire breaking out in tumult, elemental and beautiful but also brutal.

Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso squeezes every last drop of glorious life from those elements, whether its sparks thrown up by a campfire drifting down on men’s stories, water falling on a puppy’s head or an inferno blazing against man’s wishes. Bentley has an eye on rhythm, from the slow unfolding of conversations to the more unsettling, spiky nature of dreams.

The performances are lived in, Edgerton feels to the manner born as Robert and, in particular, shows a gentle responsiveness to working with the children who play his daughter. Scenes between him, Jones and the child from a baby on up have a warm spontaneity that feels like parenthood rather than pen put on paper by Bentley and his co-writer Greg Kwedar.

The supporting players are just as good, from William H Macy, whose explosive expert Arn Peeples could have sprung up from the forest floor, to Nathaniel Arcand as Ignatius Jack, whose quiet but stoic friendship for Robert provides a lifeline in hard times.

Perhaps this bygone world, even with its violent moments, feels a little too cosy in parts to fully reflect reality, but nostalgia is in many ways the name of the game – those things we pass down to others or find ourselves carrying with us for good and ill. By the end, we’re invited to embrace one character’s suggestion that, no matter what, “It’s beautiful. All of it”.

Reviewed on: 15 Jan 2026