Based on Denis Johnson’s beloved novella, Train Dreams is the moving portrait of Robert Grainier, a logger and railroad worker who leads a life of unexpected depth and beauty in the rapidly-changing America of the early 20th Century.

The follow up to the Oscar nominated ‘Sing Sing’ from director Clint Bentley is ‘Train Dreams’, a quiet, deeply felt portrait of one man’s life in early 1900s America. It follows Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) across eighty years — first as a railroad construction worker, then as a logger — as he builds, loses, grieves and simply keeps going in a world that often feels indifferent to his existence. The film’s poetic use of music and landscape creates a soft, understated mood, and its tone carries the same contemplative feel the director brought to ‘Sing Sing’.

The story’s emotional weight is anchored in Robert’s family: the brief warmth he finds in marriage, the child who gives his life meaning, and the tragedy that reshapes him entirely. Early on, Robert takes part in restraining a Chinese labourer accused of theft — a moment that ends in death and hangs over the film as a kind of lingering guilt, a “dream” he can never quite shake. Along the way he crosses paths with other isolated men, workers and wanderers who mirror pieces of his own loneliness, each encounter adding another note of poignancy to Grainier’s own story.

Edgerton is superb, carrying the film with a quiet intensity that feels lived-in rather than performed. The landscapes around him — forests, mountains, open plains — seem to absorb his sorrow, and the film’s gentle pacing creates an elegiac rhythm that’s both tragic and strangely comforting. ‘Train Dreams’ is poetic, emotional filmmaking with a moving Bryce Dessner score and I found it deeply affecting.

Rating: 4/5

Directed By: Clint Bentley

Starring: Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, Clifton Collins Jr., Kerry Condon, Will Patton and William H. Macy

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt29768334/