DUBAI: Not much happens — on screen at least — in director Clint Bentley’s elegiac “Train Dreams.” The film is based on Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella and tells the story of the 80-year-long life of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton).
Grainier was orphaned young, dropped out of school early and spent his teenage years drifting somewhat aimlessly. Then he meets Gladys Olding (Felicity Jones). They fall in love, marry, build themselves a log cabin near Idaho’s Moyie River, and have a daughter, Kate.
Jobs are hard to find in the post-WWI economy, and Grainger signs up to work in railroad construction to help expand the US’s Great Northern Railway. He also takes on seasonal logging work. All of which means he’s away from home for extended periods of time. The men he meets are mostly, like Grainger, taciturn and tough. Emotions are rarely discussed. But there are characters who become something like friends, like ageing demolition expert Arn Peeples (William H. Macy).
Edgerton is excellent. Grainier has little dialogue (indeed, most of the talking in the film comes in the form of a voiceover from an unidentified narrator), but Edgerton embodies a man with a placid surface over hidden depths. When Grainier suffers unimaginable loss, Edgerton plays out the grief, regrets, despair, and the depression empathetically and utterly convincingly, without any grandstanding.
