The New Yorker:

In Clint Bentley’s adaptation of a Denis Johnson novella, Joel Edgerton plays a builder of bridges who finds himself increasingly cut off from the modern world.

By Justin Chang

“Train Dreams” is a beautiful movie, but I can’t say that I entirely trust its beauty. The director, Clint Bentley, and the cinematographer, Adolpho Veloso, have composed a studiedly rapturous hymn to the American wilderness—to the scenic glories of babbling brooks, wispy cloud formations, and trees soaring majestically heavenward. It’s an exaltation of the natural world, rendered with an almost supernatural intensity of light and color, and with a score, by Bryce Dessner, whose rippling chords seem to evoke the sounds of cascading water. Watching the movie earlier this year, via the Sundance Film Festival’s online-viewing platform, I marvelled at the clarity of Veloso’s images, with their sharp interplay of sunshine and shadows: a patch of emerald-green forest, glimpsed from inside a cavernous tunnel, didn’t lose its contrasts on my home TV. A second viewing, this time in a proper theatre, proved more captivating still: here, at last, was a screen capacious enough to withstand the radiance of a golden-pink sunset and the faces of Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones. This is craftsmanship of an undeniably majestic order, and it has a way of both dropping your jaw and raising an eyebrow; you begin to wonder, at a certain point, if the film’s visual splendor has begun to outstrip its meaning. How exquisite is too exquisite?

If that seems an ungenerous response, it arises, I think, from the comparatively thorny, tough-minded spirit of the film’s source material: a 2011 novella of the same name, by Denis Johnson, who held the world’s beauty and its ugliness in more persuasive balance. The movie, like the novella, consists of moments from the life of Robert Grainier (Edgerton), a thoughtful, taciturn soul. He is orphaned as a young boy, sometime in the late nineteenth century, and spends much of his life in and around Bonners Ferry, Idaho; he dies, in 1968, in equally profound solitude. The eighty-odd years in between, though, are not untouched by love and companionship. Grainier falls for Gladys Olding (Jones), a churchgoing woman, as sparky and forthright as he is quiet and withdrawn. They marry, build a riverside cabin, and are soon raising an adorable baby daughter, Katie. But Grainier is a timberman, and his work forces him to leave his family for long stretches at a time. Sometimes he heads west, toward the Pacific; once, he ventures as far east as Montana. Where there are trees to be felled, lumber to be moved, and bridges and train tracks to be built, Grainier is there.

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