SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
One of the biggest movie sales at this year's Sundance film festival was for a meditative drama set in the Pacific Northwest. Critic Bob Mondello says the movie "Train Dreams," which opens this weekend, surrounds its stars with a wilderness that feels as big as all outdoors.
BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: If there were any doubt that the landscape would be a major character in Clint Bentley's gorgeous historical drama, it's dispelled just a few seconds in. We're in a forest, the camera looking upward from the trunk of a centuries-old cypress tree, its branches seemingly interlaced with the trees around it in a picture of natural harmony. Then all those other trees seem to move, and the angle starts to shift, and it becomes clear we're witnessing a majestic finale, seeing the tree fall from the tree's point of view.
(SOUNDBITE OF TREE FALLING)
MONDELLO: It is the early 20th century, an age of steam locomotives and westward expansion, of manual labor and the workers who tamed a wilderness to build a country. Robert Grainier is an unremarkable day worker in his 30s, played by a heavily bearded Joel Edgerton. He's haunted both by the glorious woodlands he's working in and by some terrible things he's witnessed there - a Chinese worker thrown off a railroad bridge he was helping to build just for being Chinese.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TRAIN DREAMS")
JOEL EDGERTON: (As Robert Grainier) What's he done?
(CROSSTALK)
MONDELLO: But Robert mostly keeps to himself without much direction or purpose, as Will Patton intones in voiceover, until he meets Gladys Oakley at a church service.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TRAIN DREAMS")
WILL PATTON: (As narrator) Gladys introduced herself, as if women did things like that every day.
FELICITY JONES: (As Gladys Oakley) Hello.
PATTON: (As narrator) And maybe they did.
EDGERTON: (As Robert Grainier) Hello.
JONES: (As Gladys Oakley) I haven't seen you here before.
EDGERTON: (As Robert Grainier) Oh, no. I've never - my...
JONES: (As Gladys Oakley) First time?
EDGERTON: (As Robert Grainier) My cousin - yeah - brought me. Well, his wife is very much - I'm Robert.
JONES: (As Gladys Oakley) I'm Gladys.
MONDELLO: Three months later, they're talking marriage and, just steps from a river filled with fish, using stones to mark where the walls will go in a house they'll build themselves.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TRAIN DREAMS")
EDGERTON: (As Robert Grainier) The bed right here.
JONES: (As Gladys Oakley) Facing here. And...
EDGERTON: (As Robert Grainier) Window?
JONES: (As Gladys Oakley) Yeah, here.
MONDELLO: Felicity Jones makes Gladys a resourceful, practical wife and mom of a daughter Robert seldom sees, since he's forever off working to support the family - working for railway lines and lumber companies with folks like a yammering old-timer played by William H Macy.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TRAIN DREAMS")
WILLIAM H MACY: (As Arn Peeples) I worked on a peak outside of Bisbee, Arizona, where we was only 11,12 miles from the sun, 116 degrees on the thermometer, and every degree was a foot long. And that was in the shade, and there weren't no shade.
MONDELLO: Robert is largely an observer in a life he doesn't examine too closely, a working stiff who watches the world change around him, the sounds of axes, cross-cut saws and all night conversations giving way to clear-cutting and new mechanical sounds...
(SOUNDBITE OF MACHINERY REVVING)
MONDELLO: ...Also to bewildering events - a great comet streaking the night sky, natural disasters, heartbreak and unspeakable tragedy that is somehow just a waystation in a tale spanning decades with Terrance Malick-like visuals.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TRAIN DREAMS")
MACY: (As Arn Peeples) Beautiful, ain't it? It's beautiful.
EDGERTON: (As Robert Grainier) What is, Arn?
MACY: (As Arn Peeples) All of it. Every bit of it.
MONDELLO: Filmmaker Bentley has crafted "Train Dreams" as a kind of cinematic poetry, the American dream experienced by unsung working folk a century ago - heartfelt, wrenching and, yes, almost unbearably beautiful. I'm Bob Mondello.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
