Joel Edgerton’s Quiet, Powerful Turn in Train Dreams — A Haunting Ode to a Vanishing World

Joel Edgerton gives a restrained, deeply affecting performance as Robert Grainier in Clint Bentley’s film adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams. Set in the Idaho Panhandle at the turn of the 20th century, the film treats an unremarkable life with cinematic care, turning small, everyday moments into something quietly epic.

Edgerton’s Robert is a bearded, reflective man who drifts through life as a logger and day laborer, uncertain of his origins and unsure even of his exact age. Bentley’s direction, Will Patton’s narration and Adolpho Veloso’s dusk-lit cinematography combine to frame Robert’s modest existence on a broad, poetic canvas — the landscape itself becomes a character, lending the film a reverent, almost dreamlike quality.

Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar adjust the novella’s structure: they postpone the story’s most jarring incident — Robert’s involvement in the killing of a Chinese laborer — and unfold it later. This choice reframes the narrative and intensifies the film’s meditation on moral ambiguity, memory and the slow erosion of an “Old World” by development and progress.

“There were once passageways to the Old World, strange trails, hidden paths.”

That sense of displacement pervades the film. Men like Robert are presented as instruments of change who rarely understand the full cost of the work they do; they witness forests felled and landscapes altered while searching for meaning. Into Robert’s life comes Gladys (Felicity Jones), who offers warmth, love and a simple family life on a one-acre homestead. Their marriage and the birth of a daughter, Kate, provide moments of domestic grace that the film renders with tenderness.

Not all is pastoral serenity. The delayed inclusion of the violent episode—portrayed by Alfred Hsing—casts a long moral shadow. A fellow worker, Arn Peeples (a nearly unrecognizable William H. Macy), voices superstitious, philosophical warnings about work that eats at the soul. Tragedy — symbolized by a wildfire and the losses that follow — forces Robert into solitude and reflection.

Edgerton’s choice to underplay the role is one of the film’s strengths: he is largely an observer, and his quiet, internalized performance suits a film that favors mood and contemplation over melodrama. At times the movie flirts with sentimentality, but those moments often act as brief respites from the film’s deeper ache.

Final impression: Train Dreams is a patient, haunting elegy for a disappearing world. It borrows visual and tonal elements from filmmakers known for meditative cinema, yet it preserves its own moral complexity and humane focus.

Details: Rated PG-13 for some violence and sexuality. Running time: 102 minutes. Rating: three stars out of four.