“It was only when you left it alone that a tree might treat you as a friend. After the blade bit in, you had yourself a war.”

I found 'Train Dreams' to be very moving. There have been whispers and, slowly, shouts of ''hollow'' attempts to pastiche Terrence Malick forming, or comparisons to 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford', and claims that Will Patton's narration often does nothing but dilute silent scenes into explanations; with all that said and acknowledged, for better or worse, this film moved me. At the end of the day, it features the profoundly performed interiority of Robert Grainier—a man who lived most of his life in a perpetual reckoning between pain and pleasure—and, with all that said, it stars the truly underrated Joel Edgerton, a filmmaker who can act with such ferocity in his eyes and direct and write with the rare touch of potential we sometimes see in actors. Edgerton has been an almost ''must-watch'' actor for me for what has been a few years now; he is making worthwhile—at the very least interesting—choices as a performer.

There are a few performances in this film that really struck me. As has been mentioned many a time, William H. Macy's character, Arn, is a wonderfully endearing presence and source of comic relief as he plays a still-working old-timer who imparts every aspect of his knowledge unsolicited and ends up dying from the disorderly trauma of a falling branch. His line about always having a family ''everywhere there is a smiling face'' ends up utterly vanquishing that initial impression that he is lonely; here is a man who knows his place in humanity. Of course, there is the aforementioned Edgerton as the tender, ruptured protagonist who wears a face we can see is at all times split between his present surroundings in the fodder forest or the railroad and the pastoral comforts of his small family's warm log cabin lit by oil lamps like a van Schendel painting. Edgerton has been an intricate performer for as long as I have seen him on screen. He deserves his plaudits, and I hope that he continues to be highlighted by films like this.

Two other performances deserve to be talked of: Nathaniel Arcand's subtle scene-stealing as Ignatius Jack, a Native American friend of Grainier who is a shopkeeper and serves as a boon to grieving Grainier in silent but steady ways. Arcand does a fantastic job of capturing and encapsulating the essence of compassion in his taciturn character's expressions. Out of the woodland blaze is reborn the log cabin in its second form with the succour of Ignatius Jack. Secondly, the performance of Felicity Jones as Gladys, Robert's wife, effectively showcases exactly what she meant to him and how much. Gladys is intelligent, resilient, has a playful sense of humour, is affectionate, and is honest. His loss of her strips him of a true partner and scars any part of him that considers moving on. Even his life with the pups that become his dogs is marked by a conversation they once had and an idea Gladys articulated—the fact puppies know more than babies. It is a terribly tragic turn of events to witness, knowing just how well they worked together. I can hardly say anything about the loss of his two-year-old daughter, Kate.

Technically, Clint Bentley's film has a very idiosyncratic execution. You have the, as previously mentioned, narration of Will Patton (who also narrated the novella), which I did not mind, but it is absolutely fair to say does sometimes explicate too much of Grainier's interior mind; also, this narration is certainly redolent of 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Ford's poetic voiceover. There is the Malickian focus on liquid camera movement and time-traversing, but this film stands alone enough in Adolpho Veloso's cinematography to not owe any particularly large debts. The pacing of the final third could have also been a little more economical; more elaboration of Grainier's elderly years might have been a compelling decision.

I was often reminded of Kelly Reichardt's 'First Cow' whilst watching this; there is a particular focus on the lush soundscape of the forest, the slowness of the story, the birth of a home and the American frontier, intermittent visual focus from a distance, and the microcosmic diversity of characters that makes this comparison work well, to my mind. Then there is Bryce Dessner's elegiac score. This score is nothing short of poignantly moving when it is deployed. It is very simple in its traversals, but the leitmotif of its main track, 'Passageways I: Ahead, Trembling', had a solemnity I consistently appreciated. Nick Cave's contribution to the song 'Train Dreams' for the credits was my favourite musical feature.

I have not read the novella this film is based on, so I cannot speak to fidelity, the value of directorial choices, and its translation to the cinematic screen, but I can say that there is a roving quality to this film that I often hope for in films; there is a persistent undercurrent in the story's twists and turns to quantify ''life''—to work out whether time at this job is worth it, whether this amount of money is enough to quit it for, whether the time spent with a daughter who drastically transforms each time you see her is ever going to be enough—but, with that ending, its themes simply ask us to think qualitatively about our lives; to consider and reckon with our trajectories with more appreciation.

One of the larger ideas I gleaned from the film was transformation. The way the world shapes and forms itself as glaciers melt, as trees are cut down, as the forest is sparked by a flame and cannibalises itself, as human bodies die and become one with the soil; as human lives are changed by marriage, death, childbirth, child and pet rearing, the physical labour of work, and the traumatic imprints of seeing a man killed probably for the colour of his skin; the way civilisation transforms in a lifetime—in this particular lifetime ranging from the fin de siècle to the moon landing—the birth of images and sounds on screens, the death of railroads or bridges in lieu of motorways and cars, and the prices we are paid for sometimes soul-destroying work and then end up paying down the line to fly. It is always changing, but there is invariably something of beauty to be found, somewhere.

Robert Grainier, an orphan, widower, and bereaved parent, has lost everything at every stage of his life, except the end. Throughout his life, he remains a soft-spoken, kindly man who deserved more than what happened to him. In the beginning, he loses his immediate family; in the middle, he works as a railroad construction man and then as a seasonal logger at $4 a day around 1920—which is to his purse's credit but is never anything more than a cost given the time spent away from his wife and daughter. At the end, flying like a bird on that $4 biplane ride in 1968, he gains some closing appreciation for it all as he thinks back on the touch of his wife, the face of his baby daughter, her voice when she only grew up to be a toddler, the generosity of a Native American friend, and the wisdom of a lonesome old feller.