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Australian actor Joel Edgerton shines in Clint Bentley’s Netflix movie, Train Dreams.Netflix
Train Dreams
Directed by Clint Bentley
Written by Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar, based on the novella by Denis Johnson
Starring Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones and William H. Macy
Classification N/A; 102 minutes
Streaming on Netflix starting Nov. 21
Critic’s Pick
Thanks to a few exceptionally made but also exceptionally long films released over the past few years, moviegoers may have fallen under the impression that the quality of a production has become synonymous with the quantity of its storytelling.
Among this past spring’s Oscar players, two approached the three-hour mark (Wicked, Dune: Part Two) with another busting through the 200-minute mark with room to spare (The Brutalist). The 2026 awards contenders will likely be of similar size and girth: Marty Supreme at 149 minutes, One Battle After Another at 170, and Avatar: Fire and Ash at 192. But there is one film lurking out there, at the moment trapped in the algorithmic backwoods of Netflix’s logjammed catalogue, that will blow you over precisely because it is an epic tale told in the most compact and economic of ways.
Adapted from the 2011 novella by the late American author Denis Johnson, Train Dreams is a decades-spanning look at the life of an early 20th-century labourer in the Pacific Northwest. As narrated by Will Patton – the veteran character actor whose tender voice also gave life to the Johnson’s audio book – the film introduces us to Robert as a boy, an orphan of undetermined parentage and birthplace who doesn’t get much schooling before he’s shipped off to work the railroad.
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Despite its rich storylines, Train Dreams’ runtime is trim and worthy of the audience’s time.Netflix
So many years pass by fitfully and uneventfully for Robert, until, in his 30s (and now played by Joel Edgerton), he meets Gladys (Felicity Jones), and the two start a family. But the need for steady work keeps Robert away from his home for months on end, deep periods of longing and hardship that allow for glimpses into all the many layers of a life spent building the America we know today. There are episodes of quiet joy, curious happenstance, and immeasurable tragedy. And through it all, the focus is kept squarely on what only Robert can see around him – his small and fragile world, slowly becoming engulfed by a larger, more overwhelming one.
As directed by Clint Bentley, who together with his creative partner Greg Kwedar has already delivered a handful of tender and riveting looks at lost American souls (Sing Sing, Jockey), Train Dreams is so clear-eyed in its ambitions and scale that it feels at once intimate and boundless, the story of a nation writ in miniature. One hundred and two minutes of poignant, accessible grandeur.
Shot with a generous, insatiable eye for the natural beauty of Robert’s world – and, eventually, the darkness that makes that beauty possible – the film invites all manner of half-baked comparisons to the work of Terrence Malick, or maybe such Malick acolytes as David Lowery (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) and Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford). Yet Bentley’s film is cut with remarkable discipline, barely a second of extraneous footage, which allows it to be both contemplative and rather electrifying.
This oddly comforting propulsive intimacy – as if you are barrelling along the tracks of the world’s quietest stretch of railway – is what helps keep the audience locked into the question that haunts Robert for the rest of his days: “Do you think that the bad things we do follow us in life?” It’s a query stemming from the inciting incident of Johnson’s novella – Robert witnessing the killing of a Chinese immigrant, one of countless railway labourers upon whose backs the country’s infrastructure were built – though it is slipped into Bentley’s film in a slightly slipperier fashion.
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Felicity Jones and Edgerton play a couple in Train Dreams, which starts streaming on Netflix on Nov. 21.Corey Castellano/BBP Train Dreams. LLC./Netflix
Robert, an uneducated man, carries the guilt with him for the rest of his days, unsure and unable to reckon with it. And that, the film argues, is just the way it was – maybe that’s just the way it is. We keep moving, forward and forward, faster and faster, until the end.
Bentley and Kwedar’s thoughtful and ambitious approach to Johnson’s source material might have likely worked no matter which performers they were able to collaborate with. Yet Edgerton, the Australian actor who has always seemed more adventurous and eclectic than his choice of projects (including a lot of middling studio fare requiring him to be the stink-eyed villain), spills open the entirety of himself here, turning Robert into something more than a mere audience avatar.
As the solitary character inches toward connecting with the rest of the world, often then almost immediately having to retreat further into himself – as in a tragicomic chapter involving a fellow labourer played by William H. Macy – Edgerton doesn’t allow pity or easy sympathy to seep in. Things are hard, things fall apart. And sometimes it all comes together. It’s a living.
