{"id":552522,"date":"2025-11-06T08:26:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-06T08:26:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/552522\/"},"modified":"2025-11-06T08:26:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-06T08:26:13","slug":"joel-edgerton-gives-monumental-performance-in-film-with-echoes-of-terrence-malick-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/552522\/","title":{"rendered":"Joel Edgerton gives monumental performance in film with echoes of Terrence Malick \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Train Dreams<\/strong> <\/p>\n

\ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d7<\/strong> <\/p>\n

Director:<\/strong> Clint Bentley <\/p>\n

Cert:<\/strong> 12A<\/p>\n

Genre:<\/strong> Drama<\/p>\n

Starring:<\/strong> Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, Clifton Collins jnr, Kerry Condon, William H Macy <\/p>\n

Running Time:<\/strong> 1 hr 42 mins<\/p>\n

Adapted from Denis Johnson\u2019s 2011 novella, Train Dreams is Clint Bentley\u2019s elegiac portrait<\/a> of a man (and his country) undergoing a quietly radical transformation. <\/p>\n

Following his acclaimed script for Sing Sing, the director turns his attention to the woodsy romance of the United States<\/a> of the early 20th century, through the person of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton<\/a>), a nomadic logger and railroad worker whose unremarkable existence mirrors the US\u2019s stealthy march towards modernity.<\/p>\n

From Robert\u2019s birth in the 1890s to his death in the 1950s, the script can feel like a western or a fable. When Robert meets and marries Gladys (Felicity Jones<\/a>), the two mark out their future on a patch of wild land in Washington State. But fate and time conspire to erode their modest version of the American dream.<\/p>\n

Bentley and his co-writer, Greg Kwedar, frame this story of love, loss and endurance with tenderness and temporal grace, with a multigenerational arc that ends after Apollo 8\u2019s voyage around the moon in 1968. The film has a stately aura of permanence, like one of the railways that the hero is toiling on.<\/p>\n

Visually, it evokes the golden reverie of Terrence Malick and the pioneering romanticism of Heaven\u2019s Gate. The cinematographer Adolpho Veloso simultaneously casts the Pacific Northwest as an idyll, a feral frontier and an expanse brutalised and shrunken by modernity.<\/p>\n

Bryce Dessner\u2019s delicate score hums like an elegy for lost trees. <\/p>\n

Will Patton\u2019s narration adds to Malickian effect and allows Train Dreams to preserve the rhythms of Johnson\u2019s spare, spiritual prose.<\/p>\n

Edgerton\u2019s monumental performance is an archaeological expedition where everything valuable is buried beneath the surface. It requires a late encounter with Kerry Condon\u2019s forestry-service worker to tease out something confessional from the reticent hero.<\/p>\n

His poignant ordinariness and interiority place him at stark odds with Hollywood\u2019s insistence on agency. It also earths the film\u2019s welcome swerves into the supernatural.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Joel Edgerton: \u2018I\u2019ve always enjoyed playing and celebrating quieter characters\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Jones brings depth to Gladys, a character that might have existed only as a papery love interest, while the ecological sermons of William H Macy\u2019s loquacious explosives expert intersect with Ted Kaczynski\u2019s lament in Industrial Society and Its Future, aka the Unabomber manifesto.<\/p>\n

Bentley sometimes leans too heavily on lyricism and voiceover, but the film\u2019s earnestness and restraint cast a strange spell. Train Dreams may mourn a disappearing US, but, more movingly, its muted reverence salutes those nation builders who were never visible to begin with.<\/p>\n

In cinemas from Friday, November 7th, and streaming on Netflix from Friday, November 21st<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Train Dreams \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d7 Director: Clint Bentley Cert: 12A Genre: Drama Starring: Joel Edgerton, Felicity…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":552523,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,132620,49143,161994,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-552522","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-felicity-jones","10":"tag-joel-edgerton","11":"tag-kerry-condon","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115501805448532366","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552522","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=552522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552522\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/552523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=552522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=552522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=552522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}