Train Dreams review – Joel Edgerton superb in Malickian story of trees, grief and railroad

A logger clears a path for change in this sunset-hour-tastic adaptation by Clint Bentley – clearly a director of considerable power and feeling.

The dreams of the title are premonitions of the future, memories of the past, yearnings for an alternative present – and sometimes just the dreams that disturb the sleep of the film’s lead character, a logger named Robert Grainier, richly and expressively played with few words by Joel Edgerton. He is part of an exploited itinerant labour force in the early 20th century who cleared woodland wildernesses, built bridges and made way for the American railroad. He lives a quasi-hobo existence but is possessed of a passionate, unspoken inner life to which this fine movie gives expression. His emotional life is the tree that falls in the forest without making a sound.

Director Clint Bentley has adapted the 2011 novella by Denis Johnson, co-writing the script with Greg Kwedar; they have created a lovely looking, deeply felt film, clearly absorbing the influences of Terrence Malick in some of the low camera positions, sunset-hour compositions, narrative voiceovers, and epiphanically revealed glories of the American landscape. There is also something of the early work of David Gordon Green, a film-maker once considered an heir to Malick.

Edgerton’s Robert is a man who grew up an orphan in Idaho, stoically accepting his hardship and his loneliness, working a brutally tough job. He is also the haunted witness to a racist assault on a Chinese labourer (although the film effaces what in the original novella was his complicity in this). He is quietly astonished by the miracle of meeting and marrying Gladys (Felicity Jones), having a baby with her and being exalted by happiness, but heartsick at having to leave for long periods of time to support them.

On the job, he works with taciturn, weatherbeaten men whose own histories seem as unreadably blank as the trees they cut down. And yet the film shows how Robert savours, or is startled and appalled, by the revelations of their personalities. William H Macy is talkative old-timer Arn, who is in charge of the alarmingly unsafe explosives, and Paul Schneider is the strangely jabbering “Apostle Frank”.

Robert sees a heartstopping fate for both men, and is also transfigured by the beauty of all that surrounds him, while troubled by the sense that he is despoiling it. He can see a future in which he is one of the silent drifter caste who do nothing but saw down trees. And above all he is stricken by the absence of his wife and child – a pain that runs concurrently with his joy at periodically seeing them again. He and Gladys have plans to open a little sawmill: perhaps it would be best to quit his wandering life and do it now while there is still time.

The later sequences in the big city show that part of the mystery of any life is how very short it is, how it can be telescoped into a fleeting series of remembered moments; Edgerton transmits all this with sympathy and grace.