Joel Edgerton plays Robert Grainier, an early-20th century logger and railroad worker who faces a rapidly-changing America in the teaser trailer for director Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, which dropped on Thursday.
Felicity Jones, who plays Gladys, Grainer’s wife, William H. Macy and Kerry Condon also star in Bentley’s drama that adapts Denis Johnson’s prize-winning novella. “I don’t know where the years go,” a meditative Grainer says at one point in the trailer amid scenes where he rides the rails or, long axe in hand, eyes giant trees to possibly chop down.
Macy, who plays Arn Peeples, an explosives expert, finds lyrical beauty in an early 20th century America where the outside world is fast closing in on their traditional, pastoral way of life. “This world is intricately stitched together, boys. Every thread we pull, we know not how it affects the design of things,” Macy’s character says from around a campfire.
Train Dreams bowed in Sundance and is headed next to the Toronto Film Festival for an international premiere. The film is directed by Bentley from a script he wrote with Greg Kwedar after they worked together on the Oscar-nominated Sing Sing drama.
Bentley said of his latest movie in a director’s statement: “I think most of us will never have some great impact on history and yet we will lead very, very deep and beautiful lives. There’s something very special about [Robert Grainier’s] story in that it is so specific to this one person’s life, and yet there’s a universality to it of a person trying to navigate a world that’s changing around them constantly — kind of leaving you behind, even as you’re still alive.”
The Hollywood Reporter‘s chief film critic David Rooney said of Train Dreams in his Sundance review: “At the risk of gushing, I adored this perfectly formed movie. It elevates Bentley into the league of essential American filmmakers.”
Train Dreams is produced by Marissa McMahon, Teddy Schwarzman, William Janowitz, Ashley Schlaifer and Michael Heimler, while Edgerton, Scott Hinckley, Kwedar and John Friedberg executive produce.