REVIEW. TRAIN DREAMS: The Extradordinary Tale of an Ordinary Life.

Felicity Jones (L) and Joel Edgerton (R) in Clint Bentley's Train Dreams.

He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him.

-Denis Johnson, Train Dreams

Logger Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) never knew who his parents were. A mostly self-taught lad who came to Fry, Idaho (later Bonners Ferry) sometime before the turn of the 20th century, Robert stayed in school long enough to learn how to read, write and master basic math skills. He left school as a teen and began taking on odd jobs.

We first meeting Robert working on the completion of the transcontinental railroad. He's in his mid-thirties and a bit of a loner. One day, he meets Gladys (Felicity Jones), a beautiful and forthright woman who will soon become his wife and mother to their daughter Kate. Gladys and Robert's union appears unassuming from afar, but closer up, we see the small, private exchanges between the two, the kind of details that secure a kind of symbiotic, spiritual connection.

Co-writer/director Clint Bentley, working from Denis Johnson's 2011 Pulitzer-nominated novella of the same name, reworks the narrative with partner Greg Kwedar (Sing Sing) without losing Johnson's modest, but evocative prose, integrating its most beautiful language via a narrator (Will Patton), who tells Robert's story against the backdrop of sumptuous landscapes that provide a glimpse of the last vestiges of the American West.

Trying to capture the beauty of Bentley's film with mere words does not do justice to the experience of seeing the movie. We observe the world from Robert's view (lookng up) and God's view (looking down and around). Whenever Robert and Gladys are together, the camera movies sideways and at an angle, suggesting both the energy and movement in their connection, and perhaps, the way Robert's world was changed when he's with her. Adolfo Veloso's magnificent cinematograpy captures numerous sunsets, sunlit skies, and tree-framed pathways, alongside angry fires, torrential rainstorms, and quiet, candlelit kisses.

Veloso's camera works in tandem with Patton's narration, showing what we're hearing without merely mimicking the text. His panoramic shots, juxtaposed with intimate close-ups, add dimension, depth, and emotion to Robert's story and to the movie's broader themes of alienation, perserverence and understanding life. When three laborers die suddenly in a freak accident in the woods, the rest of the men do not have time to grieve as their work demands attention, so they hastily bury their colleagues. One of the men, Arn Peebles (the wonderful William H. Macy), an elderly explosive expert, takes the dead men's boots, and nails each pair to a tree: “Now they won’t just pass out of this world without nothin’ to show they was here,” he says.

The camera lingers on the boots, an image that stays with Robert. Years later, he passes by those same trees and sees the boots still there. It's this kind of storytelling, where not much happens, and yet life goes on, that underscores Johnson's novella and Bentley's film. Robert struggles with something common to all of us: his raison d'être. He can't seem to understand how the events of his life fit together, why he is here, if he will be remembered. And so he lives on.

Robert spends long periods of time away from Gladys and Kate, and the times he returns to be them are sweet and happy. But when a devastating fire sweeps through the Moyea Valley where Robert has built a cabin, he returns to find everything has perished and his family gone. Against the advice of others, Robert rebuilds the cabin, with the help of a Native American named Bob, looking for any small clue that his wife daughter escaped the fire. He hears Gladys's voice in the wind, and imagines her returning. He nurses a feral child back to health, convinced that she is his lost daughter Kate.

And so Robert waits, going about his daily activities, haunted by memories of his life, wondering, in his loneliness, if life will ever make sense to him. When he meets a forest surveyer named Claire (Kerry Condon), she invites him up to the tower where she works. Looking out on the land stretching before them, Robert experiences a new perspective on the valley devastated by the fire. Claire tells him, "It’s all threaded together, so you can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins if you really look at it."

The cast here is superb, from Macy's folksy Arn to Jones's resilient Gladys to Condon's straightforward surveyor. It's hard to imagine anyone playing Robert than Edgerton, whose face says more with silence that dialogue ever could. I was reminded of his quiet, dignified performance in Loving (2016), based on the true story of an interracial marriage in 1950's Virginia. Bentley has made an extraordinary movie about an ordinary man, whose life begins and ends without notice, but whose very existence is an integral part of the universe.

I want to put in a mention that Nic Cave's original song, "Train Dreams," which is sung as the credits roles, deserves strong consideration for the Oscar's Best Original Song. Its lyrics capture all the details that defined Robert's life, and the melody evokes the sweet sadness that echoes the world surrounding his existence. It's exactly what an original song should do: raise up and elevate a movie's essential theme.

In his later years, Robert travels a bit to see the world around him (Spokane), a world where people now travel via highways, where Elvis has changed our social molecules, where John Glenn has orbited the earth. All these things are just small things that happen compared to the memories Robert holds dear, but they are all pieces in his life.

On a spring day, he decides to take a ride in a bi-plane and sees the world in a totally new way, even upside down where, as narrator tells us, ""he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt, at last, connected to it all." In that moment when his world is literally turned upside down, everything seems to make sense. We learn in voiceover that Robert never learned who his parents were, never owned a firearm, and never spoke into a telephone. He left no heirs behind him.

To be sure, there have been other films about "ordinary people," from Robert Redford's first directing effort of the same name, through Forrest Gump to this year's Life of Chuck. What makes Train Dreams different from its predecessors is the way Bentley doesn't try too hard to show the beauty in one individual's existence. As Robert flashes back and forward in his mind, remembering all the people and experiences he holds dear and imagining what is yet to come, we glimpse all the ways his simple, ordinary life is utterly remarkable.

And suddenly it all went black. And that time was gone forever.

*******

Train Dreams may still be playing in very limited release in theaters. Catch it on a big screen, if you can, if only for the movie's exquisite beauty. Train Dreams is also available on Netflix. It is rated PG-13 for some intense and mature scenes.