"Train Dreams" is One of the Finest Films of the Year

One of the best things about the Chicago International Film Festival, aside from the fact that it’s essentially held in my backyard, is that it more often than not has a lineup that overlaps heavily with TIFF. It gives me a really great security blanket to prioritize some of the films that couldn’t squeeze into my Toronto schedule. One of the biggest misses for me this year at TIFF was Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams. This film without a doubt takes my top choice of films I saw at CIFF this year, and serves as one of the finest examinations of pre and post-war industrialization we’ve received in a long time. 

The film follows Joel Edgerton’s Robert Grainer, a logger, who from the end of the 1800s, through his life in early 1900s America experiences both his own world, and the overarching one he lives in transforming into something that will sooner than he believed, forget him entirely. 

There is a melancholic meditativeness to Train Dreams that feels deeply rooted in the time period. There is an enveloping embrace of the collective human experience that is told through a wholly American-feeling, individualized lens. There are several major actors playing important roles in the film, but at the end of each scene, we always find ourselves back with Edgerton. Who, if not previously, has now cemented himself as perhaps the most underrated talent of his generation. 

The word "invisible" is thrown around a lot when discussing performances by big names that are so maximalist in nature, that the actors themselves seem to fade away in favor of a larger-than-life entity. It’s a word that should be synonymous with performances like Edgerton’s in Train Dreams far more than it is, because for a man who to my best recollection never so much as raises his voice in the entire film for more than a single line, he utterly dissolves into this role. It may be my favorite male performance of the year. 

In the cast of supporting characters, Felicity Jones and William H. Macy remain the two major standouts, with Macy giving perhaps his best performance since Magnolia. The measurement of character impact in Train Dreams is the epitome of the expression quality over quantity. In a way that is far from dissimilar to the lives we all lead, the involvement of Robert Grainer’s most treasured companions in life ebbs and flows in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways. Characters leave, return, and disappear again without warning or explanation, serving as one of many additional representations of the instability and callousness of the era.

Grainer suffers from a guttural sense of impending doom and quiet paranoia that is exacerbated further from the lack of control he so desperately craves as both a man seeking peace, and a man pigeonholed by occupation and geographical location. The devastation of the film is far from graphically presented, and more so accentuated by the completely breathtaking old Americana landscape, that through more than a few separate man-made choices or laws of nature, becomes pulverized beyond recognition by the time the credits roll. 

It’s far from outright cynical about how our world is progressing on a climate basis, especially considering the seems to be the first year in a long time where we’ve gotten some actual good news about the ozone layer, but its nihilism about our individual place within it all is enough to make the most evil people you know shed a tear or two. 

For being as inherently meditative as it is, the pacing feels timed to the scene, and clocking in at an abnormally short for its goals 102 minutes, there isn’t a moment of this that felt reduced in emotionality by a lack of reflection. If anything, any desire you may have to return to a previous moment serves an even greater purpose. The best moments of the film are fleeting, much like our day to day. 

Train Dreams also further cements my prediction of this being one of the tightest cinematography awards races we’ll likely see for a long time. Adolpho Veloso, a previous collaborator of Bentley, and future collaborator of M. Night Shyamalan shoots the film to utter perfection through a sensational understanding of natural lighting and shading. Coupled with some of the most poetic (if occasionally overwritten) dialogue of the year, makes the film feel all-in-all as if a painfully nostalgic lullaby is soothing you along into a new chapter amidst your innate desire to freeze time completely. 

The film is making a limited theatrical run beginning on November 7th, before debuting on Netflix globally on November 21st. Of course I recommend the theatre above all else, but if you’ve got a solid set-up at home, this is one of those rare films that may play even better in the complete silence of your home screening room. Once you’ve supported it in the cinema, soak it in more at home. It’s one of the finest films of the year.