There’s a certain type of movie one comes to expect from Sundance: a spare but beautifully filmed family drama featuring a reticent protagonist in an evocative rural setting, favoring quietness to the point of remoteness such that it doesn’t quite deliver on its emotional potential. At first glance, Train Dreams, starring Joel Edgerton as a devoted family man and isolated loner in the early 20th-century logging business, seems like it will fall into the trap of stale airiness. At times it does, too maddeningly fascinated with the experience of rustic isolation and too reliant on the unsaid or assumed. Like fellow Sundance premiere Omaha, Train Dreams compensates for a terse male lead with the grand, rapturously filmed scenery of the US west – in this case, the lush and primordial forests of northern Idaho and Washington.
Luckily, one cannot get enough of these beastly woods, so towering and teeming with life, and so rapaciously plundered by the American appetite for industry. At its best, writer/director Clint Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar have crafted a gorgeous and poignant film of quiet, bruised life in a fragile place, anchored by a magnificently sensitive and restrained performance from the still-underrated Edgerton.
