REVIEW: Joel Edgerton Shines In Clint Bentley’s Tender Adaptation Of ‘Train Dreams’
- Emma Fisher
- 1 minute ago
- 5 min read
This article contains spoilers for Train Dreams.
Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, adapted from Denis Johnson’s novella, is a haunting and remarkably tender exploration of how love anchors a life and how grief reshapes it in its absence. Working from a script co-written with Greg Kwedar, his collaborator on last year’s remarkable Sing Sing, the pair craft a portrait of a man shaped and undone by the passage of time.
Orphaned at a young age, Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) grows into adulthood as a logger in the Pacific Northwest during the early twentieth century. From the outset, the film places Robert in a world already shifting around him. Logging seasons pull him deep into forests for long stretches, and the rapid expansion of the railways both sustains his livelihood and signals the arrival of an industrial modernity that will quietly leave him behind. A man of few words, his story is told via third-person narration by Will Patton, whose voice is at once calming and devastating. He recounts the formative moments that shape Robert’s life, including the racist murder of a Chinese labourer (Alfred Hsing) working the tracks beside him, an event that Robert comes to believe his silence helped enable, and consequently, leads to the tragedies to come that devastate his life.
Away from work, Robert meets, courts, and marries Gladys (Felicity Jones). Together, they build a modest dream on an acre of land and welcome their daughter, Kate (Zoe Rose Short). Jones complements Edgerton’s silence well, and while her screentime is limited, their chemistry is natural, that of a young couple in love who believe in the shared life ahead of them. However, the film’s early movements establish a rhythm of leaving and returning. Robert continues to spend months in the woods, returning home to find his wife and daughter have changed in his absence. Kate, now a toddler who babbles and walks, seems like a new child each time he sees her, and Gladys, while supportive, grows increasingly weary of the separations. Bentley handles these moments with delicacy, capturing the tension between affection and frustration without overstating it, a running theme that lends the film its melancholic tone. Gladys longs to join Robert out on the cut, but he refuses, citing dangers he cannot bring himself to articulate.
Robert tries, at various points, to find work closer to home, but opportunities are limited in the post-war years. Money becomes tighter than ever, and Patton devastatingly narrates that he does not realise that this period, despite its hardships, will be the one that he later recalls as his happiest. Gladys dreams of expanding their acre, turning it into a proper farm, perhaps even starting a small sawmill if they can save enough. It’s the stability they crave, and a life in which Robert no longer disappears for months at a time. Before this dream can take shape, tragedy strikes. From here on, Train Dreams becomes a devastating tale of loss and the guilt that accompanies surviving it.
The years that follow grow increasingly solitary, a far cry from the stability his land once knew. Robert takes work where he can, logging again, then later hauling goods and people by horse and wagon. Ironically, he feels disconnected from those around him, even if he sees them more often. The world moves on, as it tends to, and Robert drifts slowly outside of it.
Claire Thompson (Kerry Condon), a Forest Service employee tasked with managing timber cuts and preventing fires, is one of the few people Robert meets later in life who treats him with genuine understanding. She, too, has known loss. The scene where he finally speaks of it to her is one of the film’s finest. “It feels like the sadness will just eat me alive,” he says, “but sometimes it feels like it happened to somebody else.”
Robert’s life becomes defined by waiting. First, for Gladys and Katie, then for clarity, and finally for something he can’t quite name. He hears their voices in the woods surrounding their land sometimes, laughing or murmuring just out of sight, and is afraid to turn his head in case he frightens them away. Whether these moments are dreams, visitations, or hallucinations, Train Dreams presents them as the shape grief takes for a man who has no language for his sorrow despite the depth of his feeling. Edgerton captures this with remarkable subtlety, his expressions carrying emotions he cannot speak. It's a breathtaking performance, one that Netflix does not feel strong enough to carry.
A final flight in a small plane offers Robert a moment of connection with the life he has lived. When the pilot tells him to hold on to something, he grasps what truly matters: Gladys, Kate, his work, the people he encountered, and the small but meaningful moments that formed the pattern of his years. The montage that accompanies this, gentle and unforced, grants him a kind of peace. Bentley and editor Parker Laramie create a sequence that, in almost any other film, would feel trite. Not long after, Robert dies in his sleep, and the film closes with the same quiet restraint with which it began, much like the man himself.
Visually, Train Dreams is a marvel. Adolpho Veloso’s cinematography captures the Pacific Northwest with a lived-in beauty. Shoes nailed to a tree, the forests, rail lines, and open acres of land are rendered with a sense of wonder and awe - each touched by people who were here before us, alongside us, and ready to be felt by those who come after. Bryce Dessner, member of The National, complements this with a score that feels alive and echoes a life half-lived in distant memory. Their work is mesmerising. So, too, is Edgerton’s. It is no exaggeration to say that this is his finest performance to date. His sorrow seems to press in on him from all sides, written across every inch of him and throughout his silence. Performances from Jones, Condon, and William H. Macy, playing Arn Peeples, an explosives expert that Robert calls a friend before he too is gone, are brief in nature, but no less important.
Train Dreams succeeds because it treats an unremarkable life with respect. It shows how love, grief, work, and environment shape a person, and how even the quietest of lives contain extraordinary depth. Robert Grainier may not have changed the course of history, but he experienced something just as significant. He loved, he lost, and he endured. In doing so, he reminds us that a meaningful life does not require grandeur; it requires only the courage to keep going, even when it feels as though the world is moving on without us. And who knows, maybe our stories, and the traces we leave upon the earth, will be remembered one day by those who come after.
Rating: ★★★★½
About Train Dreams
Release Date: November 21, 2025
Executive Producers: Joel Edgerton, Scott Hinckley, Greg Kwedar, and John Friedberg
Writer: Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar
Director: Clint Bentley
Distribution: Netflix
Cast: Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, Nathaniel Arcand, Alfred Hsing, Clifton Collins Jr., John Diehl, Paul Schneider, with Kerry Condon and William H. Macy. Narrated by Will Patton.
Synopsis: Based on the beloved novella by Denis Johnson, Train Dreams is the portrait of Robert Grainier (Golden Globe nominee Joel Edgerton), whose life unfolds during an era of unprecedented change in early 20th-century America. Orphaned at a young age, Robert grows into adulthood among the towering forests of the Pacific Northwest, where he helps expand the nation’s railroad empire alongside men as unforgettable as the landscapes they inhabit. After a tender courtship, he marries Gladys (Academy Award nominee Felicity Jones) and they build a home together, though his work often takes him far from her and their young daughter. When his life takes an unexpected turn, Robert finds beauty, brutality, and newfound meaning in the forests and trees he has felled.