WHAT I LIKED: Charting one entire lifetime, Clint Bentley's 'Train Dreams,' is a film about grief, guilt, and a search for meaning in it all.
Robert (Joel Edgerton) is a logger who spends his days in the Pacific Northwest cutting down trees to build infrastructure at the turn of the 20th Century, and that automatically relieves him of the usual everyday concerns and distractions associated with modern life. Without those, he has lots of contemplating to do, and a voiceover tells us he feels pretty aimless untill he meets the love of his life (Felicity Jones).
They build a lovely simple life together, but Robert soon becomes haunted by guilt and the vivid visions of divine retribution when he fails to save some fellow loggers from death. Then his love and child die in a forest fire, and with the meaning he found suddenly stripped away, he stops trying to put one foot in front of the other at all. A couple of people help him get back on his feet though, and eventually he comes to realise that the meaning in it all come from his memories with the people he's connected with, as well as the miraculous nature all around him.
That's a quietly impactful conclusion, and it's made all the more powerful by the forest backdrop which is filmed beautifully by Adolpho Veloso, and the contemplative score from Bryce Dessner.
WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: It is certainly a slow burn; not just in its editing, but also in its script, as it lacks a central question to drive the narrative forward. That means it can often feel meandering, and it also makes the thematic conclusion feel like more of a surprise than a well-built conclusion.
VERDICT: Clint Bentley's 'Train Dreams,' is a long, winding story that builds a picture of a lifetime and then looks back on it all at the end to quietly profound results.
