‘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, Practice Goals boasts a superbly elegiac tone that conveys the profound feelings its primary character can’t totally convey 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 light ironies and modest design have a cumulative energy.

Wealthy and poignant

This Sundance premiere shouldn’t 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, lately earned a Finest Tailored Screenplay Oscar nomination alongside his longtime inventive companion Greg Kwedar for Sing Sing, so his stature amongst indie crowds ought to proceed to rise. And the forged of Practice 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 — Practice Goals introduces us to Robert (Edgerton), a soft-spoken orphan who grew up not realizing his dad and mom and even the date of his birthday. Working as a logger serving to to clear a path by means of the thick woods in and round Idaho for forthcoming railroads originally 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 depart his household for weeks at a time to earn a dwelling, the space aside beginning to take its toll.

Arthouse viewers will have the ability to spot the cinematic reference factors for Practice 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 timber a short lived Eden. Bryce Dessner’s lilting rating, stuffed with banjo, ukulele and strings, has the impression of a sustained sigh, lamenting the movie’s solitary, closed-off protagonist in addition to the attractive 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 not often feels expositional. As an alternative, Practice Goals holds a pressure 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 elucidate exactly what ache Robert is concealing would threat spoiling among the movie’s most affecting twists. However from early on in Practice 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 exhausting truths about racism, loss, guilt and the merciless passage of time. Bentley, who co-wrote the screenplay with Kwedar, views Robert as somebody dwelling throughout an important interval in American historical past — a seemingly nameless no one left behind by industrialisation. Practice Goals can often turn into too maudlin, treating Robert like a saintly harmless, however Edgerton’s dedication to portraying this logger with gravitas helps push in opposition to these makes an attempt to beatify the character.

Jones brings some grit to her function as Gladys, Robert’s real love who additionally dangers being idealised by the filmmakers. The actress works exhausting to raise the character past being only a simplistic picture of pure wifely grace. Macy shines as an eccentric older logger, his concern that the American wilderness will disappear connecting to Robert’s deep-seated worries that this gruelling work will ultimately be the top of him. (As we are going to uncover, logging casualties are usually not unusual.) And in a quick 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, Practice Goals has the maturity and hushed melancholy acceptable for a movie that bids farewell to a particular time in America and likewise a particular type of American frontiersman. That nostalgia shouldn’t be all the time interrogated as sharply as one would possibly hope, however it’s exhausting 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.