Adapted from a novella by Denis Johnson, “Train Dreams” is an “elegiac portrait of a man (and his country) undergoing a radical transformation”, said Tara Brady in The Irish Times. Set in America’s Pacific Northwest, it follows a jobbing worker called Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) from his birth in the 1890s to his death in the 1950s. His is a poignantly ordinary story “of love, loss and endurance” that takes place during the rapid industrialisation of an untouched wilderness. The film mourns that vanished US, and “salutes those nation builders who were never visible to begin with”.
Grainier “epitomises strong but silent American masculinity”, said Laura Venning in Little White Lies. Early on, while working on a railway bridge, he witnesses the “horrific” murder of a Chinese labourer at the hands of his colleagues. Later, he falls for the “vivacious” Gladys (Felicity Jones), with whom he has a daughter. They build a house and live a version of the American dream, until tragedy befalls them. That is more or less all that happens, but to recount the plot “is to undermine one of the film’s many strengths: its non-linear unfolding of images and fragments of the story as if we, the audience, are drawn into Grainier’s memory”.
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