‘Train Dreams’: Sundance Review

Dir: Clint Bentley. US. 2025. 102mins

A portrait of a Job-like particular person navigating the depths of his unexpressed sorrow and isolation, Prepare Goals boasts a superbly elegiac tone that conveys the profound feelings its major character can’t totally deliver himself to really feel. Joel Edgerton performs an everyman US logger and railroad employee within the early twentieth century, the actor making quiet decency appear nearly heroic. With apparent money owed to Terrence Malick and bygone epic cinema in regards to the vanishing American frontier, Jockey director Clint Bentley sculpts a sentimental story whose mild ironies and modest design have a cumulative energy.

Wealthy and poignant

This Sundance premiere should not have any downside attracting patrons, who will courtroom grownup audiences craving a mature, tear-jerking drama. Bentley, whose Jockey performed at Park Metropolis in 2021, not too long ago earned a Finest Tailored Screenplay Oscar nomination alongside his longtime inventive accomplice Greg Kwedar for Sing Sing, so his stature amongst indie crowds ought to proceed to rise. And the forged of Prepare Goals, which incorporates Felicity Jones, Kerry Condon and William H. Macy, will solely additional appeal to viewer curiosity.

Primarily based on Denis Johnson’s novella and lovingly narrated by Will Patton — who additionally supplied narration for the audiobook — Prepare Goals introduces us to Robert (Edgerton), a soft-spoken orphan who grew up not understanding his mother and father and even the date of his birthday. Working as a logger serving to to clear a path by way of the thick woods in and round Idaho for forthcoming railroads firstly of the twentieth century, he lives an itinerant life till he meets Gladys (Jones), a strong-willed native magnificence. Very quickly, they marry and have a baby, though Robert usually should go away his household for weeks at a time to earn a residing, the gap aside beginning to take its toll.

Arthouse viewers will be capable to spot the cinematic reference factors for Prepare Goals, with Bentley’s decidedly classical filmmaking fashion consciously recalling Malick’s sun-draped scenes of besotted lovers and Michael Cimino’s sweeping interval piece Heaven’s Gate. Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso depicts the untamed American Northwest as a fecund forested wilderness, its infinite bounty of towering bushes a short lived Eden. Bryce Dessner’s lilting rating, filled with banjo, ukulele and strings, has the affect of a sustained sigh, lamenting the movie’s solitary, closed-off protagonist in addition to the gorgeous pure world he adores.

Edgerton usually portrays stoic people, however Robert represents one thing richer and extra poignant — a person who observes greater than engages, in some methods a bystander in his personal life. Patton’s narration elucidates the character’s ideas, however the restrained textual content hardly ever feels expositional. As a substitute, Prepare Goals holds a stress between the feelings Robert retains at bay and the insights Patton’s phrases present. All through, Edgerton’s haunted eyes trace on the ache beneath that rugged exterior.

To clarify exactly what ache Robert is concealing would danger spoiling a number of the movie’s most affecting twists. However from early on in Prepare Goals, when Robert learns what can occur to the Chinese language immigrants who work alongside him constructing America’s railroads, this man will expertise a sequence of onerous truths about racism, loss, guilt and the merciless passage of time. Bentley, who co-wrote the screenplay with Kwedar, views Robert as somebody residing throughout a vital interval in American historical past — a seemingly nameless no person left behind by industrialisation. Prepare Goals can often turn out to be too maudlin, treating Robert like a saintly harmless, however Edgerton’s dedication to portraying this logger with gravitas helps push towards these makes an attempt to beatify the character.

Jones brings some grit to her position as Gladys, Robert’s real love who additionally dangers being idealised by the filmmakers. The actress works onerous to raise the character past being only a simplistic picture of pure wifely grace. Macy shines as an eccentric older logger, his worry that the American wilderness will disappear connecting to Robert’s deep-seated worries that this gruelling work will finally be the tip of him. (As we are going to uncover, logging casualties aren’t unusual.) And in a short however affecting look, Condon performs an impartial lady grappling along with her personal grief who crosses Robert’s path later in life, permitting him to open up in methods he by no means has earlier than.

Spanning a long time, Prepare Goals has the maturity and hushed melancholy acceptable for a movie that bids farewell to a selected time in America and in addition a selected form of American frontiersman. That nostalgia will not be at all times interrogated as sharply as one would possibly hope, nevertheless it’s onerous to argue with a drama so confidently constructed and so persuasively carried out. With immense affection, Bentley pays tribute to at least one taciturn particular person misplaced to historical past, his voice lastly allowed to be heard.