The late Denis Johnson's stories are often poetry that contain aspects of both outsider and insider fiction -- the lives of people living both on the outside and on the inside of their times.
Clint Bentley's visually captivating film version of Johnson's celebrated Train Dreams (2011) gets as close as possible to capturing that which breathes best and most believably on the written page. It's a stunning accomplishment.
Aussie Joel Edgerton, an actor who is gifted at personifying quiet introspection, plays Robert Grainier, an Idaho logger in the first half of the 20th century, experiencing life's exigencies and horrors with stoic detachment. Then Robert falls in love with Gladys (an iridescent Felicity Jones) and discovers connection and beauty and joy, but then loses them, and perhaps his grip on sanity, to nature's seeming indifference. It's an existentialist's dream (nightmare?).
Grainier speaks maybe 200 words through the entire picture, but Edgerton's essential, "articulate" presence never leaves the screen. The character's longest speech comes as he stands on a Forest Service tower with a ranger named Claire, the always wonderful Kerry Condon, and tells of his great loss and sorrow in words that are both spare and resonant.
Edgerton's delivery is the work of a master craftsman, delivering with truth and maybe reverence Bentley's benediction for Johnson, who died of cancer in 2017, and for true purity of purpose and the human ability to find even small things restorative and affirming.
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