Perhaps fitting considering the gentle tone and understated, serene moodiness of the film itself, Train Dreams has quietly crept into the Oscars race in recent months after well-received screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival and AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles following its premiere at Sundance last January.
The sophomore directorial effort of Clint Bentley (2021’s acclaimed drama Jockey), who adapted Denis Johnson 2011’s novella with his Sing Sing cowriter Greg Kwedar, Train Dreams follows an Idaho logger (Joel Edgerton) who struggles with leaving his wife (Felicity Jones) and young daughter for treacherous work across the early 20th century American West.
Violence, tragedy and death seem to follow Edgerton’s Robert Grainier wherever he goes — to the point where the benevolent lumberjack begins to believe he’s cursed for not intervening when a Chinese railroad worker he befriended was thrown to his death from a trestle.
But for the 51-year-old Australian actor, the themes that resonated most to him in Train Dreams are the resilience of humanity and kindness of strangers. The latter is represented in the goodhearted people that Grainier encounters along the way — and particularly after his own life-changing trauma — from a Native storekeeper (Nathaniel Arcand) to a crooning explosives expert (William H. Macy) to a widowed forestry services worker (Kerry Condon).
“I’m really impressed by humans’ ability to pick themselves up and keep moving,” Edgerton (Warrior, Loving) said at a recent Los Angeles press event, where he was joined by Bentley, Jones, Macy, Condon, and cinematographer Adolpho Veloso. “Resilience and rebuilding and reparation. And oftentimes, I’m very moved by how that process is helped by the kindness of other human beings. And it gives me real faith that I think our core values are, we want to support and help each other, and we see it in times of disaster, in particular. And the kindness of strangers, perhaps, is even the most potent and special thing [about] us. “
In an unexpectedly emotional moment during the press conference, a journalist prefaced a question about the film’s depiction of fatherly grief by sharing that he’d recently lost his daughter in a car accident. Edgerton wiped away tears as he struggled through his answer.
“Now I’m not going to be able to talk,” the actor admitted. “I’ll tell you my biggest fear is what you’ve experienced. I have two 4-year-olds and I’m very happy to say they’re down the road at school right now. … But there was a time before they were born where I didn’t think that they were gonna make it into the world, partly cause of my own extreme paranoia about certain things that were happening. And they were born very early and they were in the hospital for a while. I’m not a doctor, but my mind spun out of control and my imagination went there.
“And it felt to me like my ability to offer myself up to Clint as a father and as a husband and as somebody who is terrified of such a thing, if anything, made me suitable to give myself over to Clint.”
Here are five other things we learned from the cast:
Train Dreams felt like the perfect follow-up to Jockey for Clint Bentley
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Bentley and Kwedar have formed one of the most enticing indie filmmaking tandems in recent years, and they have a particularly unique approach: While they write all their films together, they alternate who directs. Kwedar helmed their debut Transpecos (2016) while Bentley took on Jockeywhich scored a 93 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and universal acclaim for revered character actor Clifton Collins Jr. (who makes a cameo in Train Dreams). Kwedar directed Sing Singwhich not only nabbed them both Oscar nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay but also Colman Domingo’s second Oscar nomination in as many years. And Bentley is promoting Train Dreams while Kwedar films their fifth collaboration, Saturn Return.
“I was very struck by the story and reading the book,” said Bentley when asked by moderator Perri Nemiroff why a Train Dreams adaptation was his ideal directorial follow-up to Jockey. “And then the themes that it was talking about that I wanted to explore. … On JockeyAdolpho kind of came up with this style of shooting where it was mixing these very scripted moments and being very deliberate about the story we were telling. But also throwing that to the wind at times and bringing in first-time actors and bringing in animals and things like that, and just trying to almost take a documentary approach, but keep it feeling very deliberate.
“And this felt like it had so much cinematic potential in terms of mixing dreams and reality and scripted and non-scripted moments that it felt like we could elaborate upon that.”
Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones have been conspiring to work together for years
While they are both part of the shared Star Wars universe — Edgerton as Owen Lars in the second trilogy and Disney+’s Obi-Wan Kenobi and Jones as Jyn Erso in Rogue One — the actors have long wanted to work directly together.
“We have been dancing around the idea,” says Edgerton, who would earn his first Oscar nomination if he’s recognized for Train Dreams. “But I actually say that I hope we can do it again because it was a wonderful experience. I’m glad that we had this experience together in this film and had the chance to create a relationship. … Clint’s script was beautiful, I think, we all were so drawn to what was on the page. And cause Clint is so collaborative, too, and very intentional and deliberate, [we] were we able to build this relationship that was the heart of the film, but wasn’t just a dimension that was just purely romance.
“And the ability for us to build that together and feel married together in that, not just on film, but in the pursuit of all that, was very special to me.”
Responds Jones, fresh off a Best Supporting Actress nomination for The Brutalist“At the heart of it, so much of the film is about this struggle of this little family and they’re in difficult circumstances. They’re struggling to make ends meet. They’re in frontier land. They’re in this extreme environment. And they’re having to make it work as best they can.
“And part of the reason that they can make it work is the love that they have for each other. But alongside that, they have to have an incredible fortitude. They have to hunt and shoot and fish and make it work as best they can. And that’s what so much of the film about. In life, when you go through it or look back on it, it’s not one continuous period of happiness.”
Felicity Jones finds one prop particularly helpful in differentiating her characters
From Jane Hawking (her Oscar-nominated role in The Theory of Everything) to Jyn Erso to Ruth Bader Ginsburg (On the Basis of Sex), the 42-year-old continues to mix it up with every new role she takes on, and her soulful and strong-willed Gladys Grainier (who builds a fishing trap and fires a rifle with the same care she tends to their newborn) is no exception.
“I think it’s the key to keep exploring and finding something new,” Jones said when asked if she’s constantly seeking different types of roles. “I don’t know why you’d wanna repeat what you’ve done before. So much of what is brilliant about our profession is finding these characters, finding the idiosyncrasies, finding something completely different that you haven’t done before.
“And I increasingly love wearing wigs. … It’s quite helpful to have something that really helps you differentiate the character from yourself. So, increasingly, that’s become a little bit of my kit in preparing the character. But with Gladys, I felt I hadn’t played someone quite like her. Her kind of immediacy. She’s completely unfiltered.
With the film spanning more than a half-century, we see through Grainier’s rugged eyes the world changing faster than he can follow. At one point the logger shares how the wooden bridge they’d just built would be obsolete as it was replaced by a steel version just years later. And the film culminates with a particularly memorable sequence involving an early-model aircraft.
The cast certainly related.
“Watching my niece and her friends do TikTok videos, and I remember thinking, ‘I’m going let this one go, I’m not going learn this one,’” Edgerton laughed. “And now with AI … a friend said, ‘What do you want to see?’ I was like, ‘I wanna see a dog give a lecture in a 1950s university hall.’ And then I was like, ‘I wanna change the dog to like a terrier.’ And then I remember thinking, ‘I’m not going to download this thing into my phone just yet.’ I’m terrified of the future, but having my kids, I realize I have to maybe stay on top of it because they’re going to receive all this, and whatever’s next.”
Added Macy: “I don’t understand what passwords are for, because you can hack anyone anytime. I don’t understand so much that’s going on in this life. I think we made a movie about a time when things were a little more understandable, but it’s bewildering now, or at least it bewilders me.”
Said Condon, who received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for The banshees of inishherin“I have more an appreciation for older people. I feel like older people aren’t treated very well, in our society anyways. And it makes me think about how older people must feel really lonely and kind of not sure about what’s going on.
“It makes me feel sad for them. That’s what I got out of the movie … just older people feeling lonely and left behind. It kind of broke my heart for them.”
“I am an older person,” Macy responded. “You’re not that old!,” Condon fired back.
William H. Macy wrote his own song for the movie
With white hair and a bushy beard, audiences may feel like like Arn Peeples is the “oldest” Macy has ever played. But “we’re the same age,” the 75-year-old Fargo Oscar nominee who typically plays younger pointed out. “And I just love the guy. I just love his character. He’s a loner, and yet he’s so gregarious, and I love his philosophizing.
“I saw that character immediately. I wanted to play it. I had a really clear picture of how to play it. It was a marriage made in heaven. It really was.”
As for what impressed Bentley the most? “He wrote the song that’s in the movie,” Bentley revealed.
“In the script, it was just, ‘Arn sings a little tune.’ And I thought, we’ll fade down and get out. And then Bill was like, ‘I came up with a little something here.’ And yeah, it’s a great tune. He plays the harp on it.”
