The New Netflix Movie Starring Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones Isn’t Just One of the Year’s Best – It’s Critical Viewing!
The new Netflix movie starring Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones isn’t just one of the year’s best – it’s critical viewing, a film that demands attention in an era of explosive blockbusters and fleeting trends. Ethan Hawke’s Train Dreams, which quietly premiered on the streamer Friday after a limited festival run, adapts Denis Johnson’s 2012 Pulitzer Prize finalist novella into a meditative masterpiece that transforms a simple tale of early 20th-century frontier life into a profound meditation on loss, labor, and the inexorable march of time. With Edgerton as the stoic railroad worker Robert Grainier and Jones as his ethereal wife Jessie, the movie unfolds like a dream – haunting, hypnotic, and heartbreaking – earning a perfect 100% Rotten Tomatoes score from 28 critics and positioning itself as the sleeper hit of the awards season.
Based on Johnson’s slim 116-page book, Train Dreams follows Grainier, a day laborer in Idaho’s Kootenai Valley around 1917, whose quiet existence is upended by a wildfire that claims his wife and infant daughter. What could have been a maudlin period piece in lesser hands becomes, under Hawke’s direction, a poetic elegy to the American West – vast landscapes of pine forests and rushing rivers that mirror Grainier’s inner wilderness. “Denis’s work is about the spaces between words,” Hawke told IndieWire. “I wanted the film to breathe like that – slow, deliberate, letting silence do the heavy lifting.” Cinematographer Edward Lachman (Carol, Far from Heaven) captures the frontier’s sublime terror in 35mm, with long takes of Grainier felling trees or hauling rails that evoke the Sisyphean toil of building a nation on stolen land.
Edgerton, 51, delivers a career-best performance as Grainier – a man of few words whose stoic facade cracks in fleeting, devastating moments. Haunted by visions of his lost family and a Native American prophet’s curse, Grainier’s journey is one of muted resurrection: rebuilding a cabin, learning to fly a plane, and grappling with the ghosts of progress. “Rob’s not broken – he’s becoming,” Edgerton said at the Telluride premiere. Jones, luminous as Jessie, appears in flashbacks that ache with tenderness, her laughter echoing like a half-remembered song. The supporting cast, sparse but sublime, includes Billy Crudup as Grainier’s railroading partner, Chaske Spencer as the enigmatic prophet, and young Kodi Smit-McPhee as a spectral vision of Grainier’s nephew.
Hawke, directing his first feature since 2014’s Predestination, strips the story to its essence – no score, minimal dialogue, just the wind through aspens and the rumble of distant trains. Johnson’s novella, a mosaic of vignettes blending folklore and frontier realism, resists easy adaptation, but Hawke honors its lyricism with a runtime of 98 minutes that feels both eternal and ephemeral. “It’s about what we leave behind,” Hawke reflected. “Grainier’s not chasing revenge – he’s chasing meaning in the void.”
Critics are enraptured. The New York Times called it “a quiet triumph of visual poetry, Edgerton’s restraint a masterclass in understatement.” The Guardian awarded five stars: “Hawke has bottled the American sublime – haunting, humane, unforgettable.” At Telluride, it won the Audience Award, positioning it for Oscar contention in Adapted Screenplay and Actor.
Train Dreams arrives as a corrective to Hollywood’s noise – a whisper in a shouting match. As Grainier watches a train vanish into the horizon, one truth endures: some losses echo forever. Stream now on Netflix. It’s not just viewing – it’s witnessing.
