Dream Train Review – Joel Edgerton is wonderful in the royal tale of trees, sadness, and railways | film

THis dreams of the title are premonitions of the future, memories of the past, aspirations to an alternative present—and sometimes just dreams that disturb the sleep of the film’s main character, a logger named Robert Grenier, played richly and expressively by Joel Edgerton in few words. He is part of an itinerant labor force exploited in the early 1900s who cleared wild forests, built bridges and made way for American railroads. He lives a semi-tramp life but has an emotional, unspoken inner life that is expressed in this wonderful film. His love life is like a tree that falls in the forest without making a sound.

Greg Koedar adapted the 2011 novel by Dennis Johnson. The director is Clint Bentley, and they have created a beautiful-looking and deeply felt film, clearly absorbing the influences of Terrence Malick in some of the low camera positions, sunset hour compositions, narrative voice-overs, and clearly revealed glories of the American landscape. There’s also something of the early work of David Gordon Green, a film director who was once considered Malick’s heir.

Robert Edgerton is a man who grew up as an orphan in Idaho, patiently accepted his suffering and loneliness, and did extremely hard work. He is also the haunted witness to a racist attack on a Chinese worker (although the film erases what in the original novel was his complicity in this). He is quietly amazed at the miracle of meeting and marrying Gladys (Felicity Jones), having a child with her and feeling happy, but he is deeply saddened by having to leave for long periods of time to support them.

In his work, he works with taciturn, weather-beaten men whose histories seem as unreadably empty as the trees they felled. However, the film shows how Robert enjoys, or is amazed and horrified, by the revelations of their personalities. William H. Macy is chatty old Arn, responsible for the alarmingly unsafe explosives, and Paul Schneider is the strangely chatty “Apostle Frank.”

Robert sees a heartbreaking fate for both men, and is also transformed by the beauty of all that surrounds him, while being troubled by the feeling that he is corrupting him. He can see a future where he is a member of the silent, lost class who does nothing but cut down trees. Above all, he is devastated by the absence of his wife and child – a pain that coincides with his joy at seeing them again periodically. He and Gladys plan to open a small sawmill: perhaps it is best to leave behind his itinerant life and do it now while there is still time.

Later scenes in the big city show that part of the secret of any life is how short it is, how it can be intertwined in a fleeting series of memorable moments; Edgerton conveys all of this with empathy and grace.