{"id":551375,"date":"2025-11-05T19:58:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T19:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/551375\/"},"modified":"2025-11-05T19:58:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T19:58:12","slug":"times-are-a-changin-but-life-never-does","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/551375\/","title":{"rendered":"Times are a-changin’, but life never does"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the first images of a hand-felled tree, destruction, change, and transformation define Train Dreams. Ironically, so does persistence. But though the theme might be familiar for filmmaker Clint Bentley, Train Dreams marks a big step forward for him. Bentley last directed the endearing but formulaic character study Jockey<\/a>, which gave Clifton Collins Jr. his own study in lingering retrospection, and he earned an Oscar nomination for co-writing the prison drama Sing Sing<\/a>. Train Dreams looks further back than either to find its persistent American truth, a thoroughly engrossing period piece of dreamy details. Adapted from Denis Johnson\u2019s Pulitzer-finalist novella, its story of one man\u2019s lifetime\u2014ranging an absurd technological expanse, from constructing the railroads of the West to witnessing televised spaceflight\u2014is quietly told, in conversation with Kelly Reichardt and Terrence Malick.<\/p>\n

These inspirations are established early, through images of swaying wheat and through paragraphs of Johnson\u2019s prose delivered in voiceover by frequent Reichardt collaborator Will Patton. Its setting\u2014deep in the forests of the Pacific Northwest\u2014time period, and brief moments of connection with Indigenous and Chinese Americans offer up a similar outline as First Cow, but colored in by the more elegiac Americana of The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford<\/a>. It\u2019s at this aesthetic crossroads that we find Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton).<\/p>\n

The leap that life takes over the course of a single generation\u2014this simple logger living from the 1880s to the 1960s\u2014stands in for that inevitable left-behind feeling that creeps up with age, here inspiring awe rather than pissy fist-shaking at the changing times. The entirety of Train Dreams is awestruck, this potentially cloying tone and Bryce Dessner\u2019s emotional score justified by a devotion to golden hour nature photography, candlelight and campfires, and production design (courtesy of After Yang\u2018s Alexandra Schaller) that transports you as completely as the untamed wilderness.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bentley and cinematographer Adolpho Veloso isolate their characters in a cramped, boxy 3:2 aspect ratio, zooming away from center-frame lumberjacks lost in the bright greens of the foliage. It\u2019s all framed like a series of old photographs one might find in an antique store\u2014especially an early montage of Grainier\u2019s formative memories, of two-faced cows and train rides and dying men\u2014richly colored to take the burden off your imagination. The uncommon format underscores the tone of Grainier\u2019s labor: It\u2019s lonely work, and this melancholy is the silent companion to the stray bursts of violence and the percussive rhythmic thump of ax on wood. Edgerton\u2019s soft-spoken woodsman might initially seem at home in this observational, isolated, masculine milieu\u2014surrounded by sprawling nature and some choice bit players (including a charmingly blustery William H. Macy as the incredibly named old-timer Arn Peeples). But really, he belongs at home.<\/p>\n

There, working the land and raising their child, is his wife Gladys (Felicity Jones), who yearns for his return. Their small shared dream and small shared sillinesses with their daughter breezily build out a love worth working for. Jones and Edgerton bring out the best in each other, their relationship sweeter and chattier than those in Train Dreams\u2018 influences, even if the former gets fewer details to work with than her counterpart. Their dynamic also establishes something worth missing as the years pass by quicker and quicker with age.<\/p>\n

And the world turns, its cruelties and inspirations raining down in equal measure. These are split evenly between the personal and the broadly cultural. Grainier\u2019s personal traumas eat at him in striking dream sequences of feverish heat and ice-cold midnight guilt, given humanity by Edgerton\u2019s thoughtfully pained expressions. But everything around him also suffers. Under the perpetually setting sun of Train Dreams, Bentley and Sing Sing director Greg Kwedar\u2019s script spotlights all that gets chewed up for the sake of American progress. It\u2019s not just the ravenous consumption of natural resources, though that of course is touched on, but the consumption of hours, of laborers, of lives\u2014especially the lives of those who aren\u2019t white. Casual racial violence abruptly perforates the drama, though Grainier only really considers it subconsciously. Shanghai and Chattanooga are equally exotic to his mind. He\u2019ll live and die without ever visiting either, after all.<\/p>\n

But these observations are secondary to Train Dreams, as is the insight that an unavoidable percentage of the scars left on this country were built in service of ephemeral corporations and soon-to-be-obsolete technologies. It\u2019s all part of a larger, familiar sensation\u2014that as soon as you finally get comfortable doing something it\u2019s not long for this world. Train Dreams simply filters this through a detailed time period and profession. Grainier is left behind by newfangled chainsaws and the callousness of his youthful coworkers, but he could be any office or factory worker shaking his head at the latest best practices and the changing attitudes of his peers. He\u2019s haunted by universal regrets, painted in lush detail by the pointed cruelties of his era.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Train Dreams, at just 95 minutes before credits, is as efficient, accessible, and poignant as a good short story. On its surface, it\u2019s a story of the overlapping Venn diagrams of history, where a man who built his own log cabin might live to see the Apollo missions. In this 80-year snapshot, it also tells a larger story about things coming to an end just as you finally start figuring them out, and how that lamentable phenomenon affects not just individuals (like Grainier, who encounters an equally mournful Forest Service ranger played by Kerry Condon at the wrong time in his life), but nations and cultures. The only thing that really persists is change. And, just as the grass begins poking through the ashes of the latest forest fire, the ones coming after us find themselves starting the cycle anew.<\/p>\n

Director:<\/b> Clint Bentley
Writer: <\/b>Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar
Starring: <\/b>Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, Clifton Collins Jr., Kerry Condon, William H. Macy
Release Date:<\/b> November 7, 2025; November 21, 2025 (Netflix)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From the first images of a hand-felled tree, destruction, change, and transformation define Train Dreams. Ironically, so does…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":551376,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-551375","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115498864050699041","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551375\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/551376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}