I’m way behind on current films but I did catch Train Dreams last night.  I didn’t know what to expect, which is often for the best, but what I saw was not as satisfying as I had hoped.

Clint Bentley’s quiet, meditative adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novella, centers on reclusive logger Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), who lives a lonely existence until he meets Gladys (Felicity Jones), settles down with her and has a daughter.  But he still has to work, so every logging season he heads to the Great Northwest.  One season he arrives home just as a fire guts his home area and changes his life forever.

I’m all for artistic takes yet this film was distracting for me for several reasons.  We learn more from Will Patton’s narration than what is revealed dramatically.  The northwest U.S. scenery is gorgeous but so much footage is shot at the twilight hour before dusk that it seems like Robert is living in his own deeply tinted world, not our normal one with different degrees of sunshine and brightness.  Joel Edgerton’s Robert is calm, thoughtful and apparently deep, yet we rarely see him emotional at all, and the camera almost never faces him directly; he is most often seen at profile or an angle looking away.  These elements and others did not draw me into the story but rather pushed me out of it.

I’m going to assume that the source material and this adaptation of it intend to illustrate the heroic perseverance, resiliency and determination needed to exist at that time (World War I through the 1960s), in those rough conditions, and celebrate the lives that can endure them.  I think that is what viewers who really enjoy this film will appreciate.  For me, however, the film’s dramatic neutrality and ambivalence gradually led me the other way around.  Because it refuses to be more like a traditional, old-fashioned film with a clear-cut moral, I find that this movie emphasizes the overwhelming hardship of Robert’s existence.  Even with his nice family he is crushed by poverty and the perennial need to leave to find work that he doesn’t seem to enjoy.  Nature here is a killer, vast and all-powerful and tricky, merely awaiting its chance to punish the forest’s interlopers.  Add human nature to that and life seems almost unendurable.  It’s no wonder Robert has the nightmares that he does.  He matters, but in the big picture it doesn’t seem as if he counts for very much.  ☆ ☆.  29 January 2026.