"At least I know I heard all that before I finally caught a screening last month at the Netflix-operated Paris Theater. Alongside a spotty crowd and at least one man in a flat cap, I endured 102 minutes of synthetic wonderment. I'm not sure I have ever seen such a loyal adaptation so completely miss the point of its material;"
"This might sound strange, as Trains Dreams the movie follows essentially the same arc as Train Dreams the book. We begin mid-stream, several decades into the life of a logger and railroad laborer named Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton). Grainier is an honest, taciturn man making a life with his wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) and infant daughter Kate in the woods of the Idaho panhandle."
"Since premiering this past January at Sundance, Clint Bentley's adaptation of the Denis Johnson novella has been lauded by critics, screened at various film festivals, and purchased by Netflix. You may have heard that it is a magisterial, gorgeous, and quietly profound exploration of one man's life in a period of change, indebted both to classic Western films and the canon of Terrence Malick. It's possible you've heard that you really ought to have caught it in a movie theater."
Clint Bentley's Train Dreams premiered at Sundance, screened at festivals, and was acquired by Netflix, earning praise for its visual grandeur and Malick-like sensibility. The film adapts Denis Johnson's novella and traces Robert Grainier, a taciturn logger whose life spans wars, deforestation, political shifts, and natural turmoil while often experiencing extremes as glancing blows. The cinematic version follows the book's broad arc and period detail but replaces restrained subtlety with synthetic spectacle and sentimental kitsch, contracting emotional nuance into showy imagery across a 102-minute runtime and undermining the story's quieter profundity.
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