‘Train Dreams’ Is the Best Film of This Year’s Sundance Film Festival

PARK CITY, Utah—Nothing lasts, everything fades, and all is ultimately forgotten, and yet if Train Dreams roots itself in that melancholic viewpoint, it also fights against such inevitability by remembering a life overlooked.

Clint Bentley’s adaptation of Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella is even more lyrical and moving than his 2021 directorial debut Jockey, weaving tenderness and violence, beauty and hideousness, and despair and hope into a tapestry about the simultaneous ephemerality and eternity of the world. Buoyed by a sorrowful, soulful performance from Joel Edgerton as well as narration (from Will Patton) that lends it an aptly mythic quality, it’s a poignant and poetic drama about the things that vanish and those that remain, and the finest offering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

In the early days of the 20th century, young Robert Grainer grows up an orphan, knowing neither his birthdate nor the identity of his parents. As an adult (Edgerton), he works as one of the many loggers helping to clear out Northwest fields and mountains for the railroads determined to carve a path to the Pacific Ocean and the developers intent on bringing civilization to the Wild West. At church, he’s greeted by Gladys (Felicity Jones) and is immediately struck by her forwardness.

Months later as they lie on the banks of a river at dusk—the sun peeking through the treetops, which are reflected in the water below—he proposes to her. She tells him that they’re already married and simply in need of a ceremony, and afterwards, they plot out the house that Robert will subsequently build, creating a home where their love can flourish.

Flourish it does, even though in order to earn a living, Robert must routinely depart for months on end. A baby girl, Kate, is born, and Robert’s adoration of the child is matched by his distress over missing so much of her formative childhood.

His career takes him to the middle of deep forests to toil alongside rugged, colorful characters, such Arne (William H. Macy), a grizzled old-timer with a shaggy beard, an expertise in explosives, a familiarity with a harmonica, and a fondness for avoiding strenuous labor. Arne is an innate storyteller and his anecdotes about the trees they fell (some more than 500 years old) and the Civil War tents in which they sleep speak subtly but powerfully to the film’s larger sense of the transitory nature of existence, in which nothing survives save, perhaps, for the memories passed down from generation to generation.

Violence is omnipresent in Train Dreams, be it Robert and his compatriots vigorously sawing titanic trees that crash loudly and destructively to the ground, or a Black gunman who arrives at a camp and promptly shoots a bible-thumping logger dead as payback for the murder of his brother. For Robert, no viciousness is more scarring than the sudden killing of an Asian itinerant, who, for no discernible reason other than his ethnicity, is thrown off the bridge he and others were constructing. In the ensuing years, Robert is haunted by this victim’s ghost, who’s a manifestation of the guilt he feels for failing to save this stranger—or, perhaps, for momentarily thinking about abetting his homicide.

A railroad bigwig praises the laborers for creating a passageway that will endure, yet as Patton’s narrator remarks, it will be replaced by a superior concrete-and-metal bridge in short order. Time swallows all, either gradually or suddenly, as Robert learns in traumatic fashion. In the aftermath of unthinkable tragedy, he refuses, stubbornly and heartbreakingly, to accept the finality of his circumstances.

Still, just as the forests are leveled, only to sprout up once again, Robert gradually rebuilds, aided by the kindness of a Native American shopkeeper and the companionship provided by a pack of stray dogs. Even so, he’s constantly reminded that everything is destined for erasure, whether it’s a log cabin, an awe-inspiring landscape, or the cherished friendships, romances, and incidents that give meaning to our fragile lives.

Train Dreams is profoundly somber, in large part because it recognizes the peerless splendor of a wife’s kiss, a child’s laugh, and the grandeur of the American frontier. Working from an incisive script co-written with his Sing Sing collaborator Greg Kwedar, and benefiting from Bryce Dessner’s elegiac score, Bentley depicts his alternately lush and bleak (and essentially mysterious) environment with the same compassion and grace that he bestows upon Robert, whom Edgerton embodies with understated poignancy.

Struggling to comprehend a universe that affords such bountiful gifts and then invariably snatches them away, his Robert is an individual compelled, by circumstance, to wrestle with his mortality, purpose, legacy, and past, the last of which is forever gone and yet always present, as is touchingly suggested by a late encounter with a girl he believes to be his daughter.

Robert unexpectedly finds a measure of solace courtesy of a government wildlife official (Kerry Condon) whose confidence and independence remind him of Gladys, and whose own tragic experiences allow her to relate to his grief, confusion, and fear. Amour, however, is not in the cards for these kindred spirits, and the clock’s ticking hands pause for no one.

In the film’s closing passages, Robert becomes something of a man out of time, left behind as America blossoms into a superpower capable of sending a man into outer space. This is, Train Dreams understands, simply how it goes. Nonetheless, if he’s powerless to cling to the thoughts, places, objects, and people he holds most dear, Robert does manage to grasp the interconnectedness of all that surrounds him—a comforting notion amidst so much anguish.

Bentley’s sophomore feature is about the unavoidability of loss and, concurrently, a rebuke to that certainty, memorializing—and thus preserving—a breathtaking country in the throes of radical transformation, the anonymous men and women who helped remake it, and one husband and father who did what he could, in his own small way, to leave his mark. All trees, and lives, may ultimately fall, but Train Dreams proves a celebration of their everlasting vitality—and, by extension, of cinema’s capacity for keeping personal and national histories alive.