Copyright Rolling Stone
There were likely a lot of men like Robert Granier who helped build America. Rugged and stoic men, somewhat nomadic laborers who roamed from job to job, sawing trees one season and hammering railroad spikes into the ground the next. They worked in groups yet kept to themselves, watching silently as their fellow migrant workers tamed the land by day and laughed by campfire light at night. Many never settled down. Others, like Granier, married and planned futures around their families. Some of those futures came to pass. Some did not. All of these men who toiled in the early part of the 20th century lived and loved and paved the way for a nation, one callous and blister at a time. All of them had stories. An adaptation of Denis Johnson’s award-winning 2011 novella, Train Dreams trails along with Granier as he goes about his life, experiencing joy and sorrow, bliss and tragedy. We meet him as a young child, sitting alone in a boxcar after losing his parents to an unknown accident, and we observe him as an old man, watching the moon landing on television right before his death. He does not slay dragons or giants, never leads armies into battle, and will inspire neither ballads or paragraphs in history books that sing his praise. Yet, in the hands of director Clint Bentley (Jockey) and star Joel Edgerton, Robert Granier will seem to you like a hero of incredible magnitude, simply by virtue of having existed. And the movie that resurrects his lost world detail by detail, vignette by vignette, vista by stunning natural vista, is, simply put, the sort of modest masterpiece you associate with a different age altogether. That would be the 1970s, unsurprisingly, when moviemakers had the ability to craft character studies that could balance the epic and the intimate — it’s safe to assume that Bentley, his longtime cowriter and collaborator Greg Kwedar (Sing Sing), and cinematographer Aldolpho Veloso are fans of Terence Malick’s work, notably Days of Heaven. It’s probably not a huge leap to think that Edgerton, delivering what is genuinely a career-high performance in a career already brimming with highs, took a few pages out of the playbooks from New Hollywood stalwarts like Robert Duvall and Gene Hackman. Yet this interpretation of Johnson’s gently flowing narrative, guided along by a voiceover from veteran character actor Will Patton, is anything but a nostalgia piece or a pastiche of past landmarks. It’s a tribute to everyday people of another era that walks its own poetic path, content in the knowledge that one unremarkable person’s journey is remarkable enough to deserve such cinematic treatment. Editor’s picks Events do occur. Conflicts do arise. Things do happen. Granier meets his future spouse, Gladys (Felicity Jones), one Sunday morning after church; naturally, it’s she who approaches him. They court, and eventually marry. A baby daughter arrives, who this quiet and normally quite unexpressive man dotes on with a tenderness that suggests deep emotional currents beneath placid surfaces. Other loggers and and railroad laborers enter Granier’s orbit — from Apostle Frank (Paul Schneider), a chatty lover of the gospel who discovers that karma has a way of catching up to people, to the philosophical demolition expert Arn Peeples (William H. Macy, giving a crazy old coot turn that would make Walter Brennan proud). Ditto a fellow nature lover (Kerry Condon) hired to survey the woods for possible fires. As a boy, Granier once witnessed a Chinese family run out of a general store for reasons his young mind can’t fathom. Decades later, he’ll helplessly watch as a Chinese railsplitter (Alfred Hsing) is flung off a bridge. The figure will return to him regularly, a ghostly presence embodying Granier’s guilty conscience. Trending Stories A disaster looms on the horizon, and Train Dreams does not shy away from feelings of grief and pain any more than it relishes the landscapes of forestry and mountains, or respects how Granier’s quiet dignity endures even as modernity encroaches around the edges of his vanishing environments. So much of this rests on Edgerton’s broad shoulders, who plays this man with a soulfulness that’s detectable even when he merely appears to be going about his daily business. An Australian triple threat who cofounded the Blue Tongue collective with his brother Nash, Joel often specialized in tweaked genre exercises as a writer and a director (The Gift, The Square), and forged a career as a supporting actor blessed with clockwork reliability (Black Mass, Zero Dark Thirty, The Great Gatsby). When he was given something closer to a co-leading role — see: 2011’s Warrior and 2016’s Loving — you began to see that he could not only carry dramas that required brute physicality and/or nuance, but add shades to each of those colors in unexpected ways. Related Content So many films make you feel, in hindsight, that no one else could have played those characters except those who were cast. Edgerton gives you that sensation within the first 30 seconds of him being onscreen here, and that initial faith is proven time and again throughout. Everything about Train Dreams, from its gorgeous renderings of the past to Bentley’s sensitivity and eye for the perfect peripheral touch — you won’t believe how a pair of boots nailed to a tree trunk could add so much texture to an offhand image — really revolves around its star’s power to give you a whole world in a glance. There’s a sequence near the very end of the movie that couldn’t be simpler in its portrayal of experience a brief moment of transcendence, yet couldn’t literally move you to tears any more than it does. So much of that is simply the look on Edgerton’s face when, after a lifetime of working the earth, Granier is given the chance to view it from a different vantage point. Then again, this mood piece of monumental profundity and grace does the exact same thing for its viewers in terms of one man’s story. Netflix will drop this extraordinary work on its service starting on November 21st, but the movie opened in a handful of theaters as of last weekend. Not to sound like a broken record, but you owe it to yourself to see this on a big screen and with an audience if possible. It deserves a canvas as big as its heart.
