Train Dreams: epic ballad of a railroad man captures the dawning of a new America

There were moments in Train Dreams when I was reminded of Henry James’s 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle (very loosely adapted in 2023 by Bertrand Bonello), the protagonist of which wastes a lifetime seized with the belief that his fate is to be defined by some catastrophic event the proverbial beast only to realise that in doing so he has missed all opportunity for happiness. Though logger Robert Grainier’s story ultimately proves somewhat more eventful than that of James’s John Marcher, his is nonetheless a little life, albeit one set against an epic backdrop.

Adapted from a 2002 novella by Denis Johnson, Train Dreams begins in the early years of the 20th century and takes place largely in the small town of Bonners Ferry, Idaho, though its peripatetic hero moves back and forth across state lines in search of seasonal work. Grainier, we learn, is an orphan who never knew who his real parents were, but who finds a family with wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) and eventually daughter Kate (Zoe Rose Short). After failing to prevent the racist murder of a Chinese labourer (Alfred Hsing), Grainier becomes convinced he is cursed. Over the course of the film’s first half, we wait to see whether the ominous premonitions of fiery destruction that flash across the screen will be borne out, as an atmospheric score by The National’s Bryce Dessner heightens the sense of mounting dread.

Joel Edgerton turns in a career-best performance as Grainier: a man of few words, his fearful eyes belying an apparent stoicism. But it is America itself that is the film’s real star. Above all, Train Dreams is the tale of the end of one era and the dawning of another, as the land of Emerson, Thoreau and Frost bleeds into that of Steinbeck, Evans and Agee. The latter pair’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) seems a key influence: Adolpho Veloso’s hovering camera pausing from time to time as if to take portrait photos of the itinerant workers who briefly look straight into the camera. In their faces whole lives are revealed, the lines and crevices of their faces ageing them like the concentric circles in tree trunks. There are shades here too of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women (2016) and Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), although this is not SO much a neo-western as a Pacificnorthwestern, deeply embedded in the green forests of Idaho and Washington state, the grey-hewn cities of Spokane and Colville.

Grainier and his fellow loggers carve diligently across Idaho’s forests, pockmarking the landscapes. At night, the men reflect on the damage they are doing in the name of progress. “There is no end to mankind’s appetite for lumber,” reflects William H. Macy’s wizened explosives expert, “Spruce. Cedar. Tamarack. Douglas fir and white pine.” Death haunts their work: there in the ragged teeth of whipsaw, the dull blade of an axe, the ear-ringing blast of dynamite, the perennial risk that a tree will tumble in the wrong direction. At times the film is almost absurdist: some fatalities appear as if from nowhere, with one sudden, should-be devastating loss caught at a distance in silhouette, framed planimetrically in a shot that looks like something from Wes Anderson.

There are other uncanny moments. An eyeline match between past and present Grainiers that seems to collapse time. The brief, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance of a two-headed calf. The idyll that Robert builds with his family suggests the possibility of living in harmony with the environment Gladys and Kate skittering across the woodlands in dresses the colour of the native fauna, arrowleaf yellow, gilia scarlet, aster blue. But as men attempt over and again to impose their will on the world, the elemental forces of fire, ice and water continue to rise up against them.

A late appearance by Kerry Condon as a surveyor for the US Forest Service sent to prevent wild fires a departure from the novella pays lip service to environmentalism. But as the years pass and wooden bridges are replaced with structures of steel, steam trains with electric, horses with cars, spades with drills, it seems that humankind’s pursuit of dominion is unrelenting. At the film’s opening, Will Patton’s narrator declares that we have lost our connection to “the old world”, rolling it up like a scroll. By its end, man is discovering new worlds through space travel. A strange coda deviates from Johnson’s text to leave things on a far more ambivalent note. Still, we are left wondering what we won’t destroy, in the name of progress.

► Train Dreams is in UK cinemas 7 November.