Netflix spent $16 million to acquire this bittersweet historical odyssey.
PLOT: A contented logger (Joel Edgerton), plying his trade in the early days of the twentieth century, finds his life marked by tragedy as he witnesses the birth of a changing world.
REVIEW: Despite going into the Sundance Film Festival with only a modest amount of buzz, Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams wound up earning one of the splashiest deals of the festival. Netflix shelled out a massive $16 million for the rights to this elegant slice of early twentieth-century Americana, which could be an awards contender if given the proper build-up. It features one of star Joel Edgerton’s best performances and marks the arrival of director Clint Bentley as a significant talent.
Bentley’s previous film, Jockey, was an art-house success, and he recently earned an Oscar nomination for co-writing the screenplay to Sing Sing. Train Dreams feels like the movie that will put him on the map in a big way. It is a gorgeous, contemplative meditation of man’s place in the world that feels unlike anything I’ve seen in recent years. It’s like an early Terrence Malick film (more in the vein of Days of Heaven than anything recent), depicting a 19th-century man coming to terms with his place in the 20th century.
Edgerton has never been better than he is as Robert Grainier. An itinerant logger who was born in the late 19th century, he plies his trade in post-Great War America and finds happiness when he falls in love with a kind woman named Gladys (Felicity Jones) and has a child. Yet, when working on the railroad, he witnesses the racist murder of a Chinese rail worker. He’s haunted by the victim, partly because, due to neither speaking the other language, the worker died thinking Grainier was a participant in his murder, even though he was trying to save him. Whatever the case, Grainier feels like a participant in his death, and is traumatized by what he saw, with it tainting his life from then on.
One thing Train Dreams does beautifully is depict how, even if the world around him was changing, in the early twentieth century, men like Grainier were still living distinctly 19th-century lives. While surrounded by beauty (expertly shot in 1:33:1 by DP Adolpho Veloso), the world was also fraught with danger. Whole families could be wiped out in an instant.
The movie follows Grainier’s odyssey as he struggles with the increasing fickleness of fate, and Edgerton’s performance is deeply empathetic. While a man of the land, he’s not uncurious about the world around him and has a deep, kind streak that makes his journey easy to invest in. Edgerton has never been better, with the entire film resting on his shoulders, with him virtually never off-screen. He’d be remembered at the 2026 Academy Awards in a just world.
Felicity Jones is similarly good as his kind but strong wife, who puts up with the fact that, due to the nature of his work, she’s left raising their child alone for months at a time. Some may compare it to her recent work in The Brutalist, but one could argue she’s more idealized here, as we only ever see her through Grainier’s point-of-view, with him unfailingly adoring her throughout. William H. Macy also has a nice turn as a grizzled logger who takes Grainier under his wing for a spell, while Kerry Condon has two fantastic scenes as a woman our hero encounters during his middle years, and proves to be his window into a changing world.
It’s heartening to know that Train Dreams left Sundance with such a great distribution deal, as it’s among the best films I saw at the fest. It’s the kind of movie that stays with you long after you see it and hopefully will get the kind of build-up it deserves, as it will likely rank among the best films of the year when all is said and done.
