Train Dreams

Clint Bentley’s magnificent “Train Dreams” is a film of echoes. In its generation-spanning drama, life & death intertwine in the duality of the symbol of the train, something that represents both progress and destruction. The railroad tracks that expanded their way across the United States in the 20th century both made the world smaller by connecting people and altered the landscape by cutting down trees that had been there for centuries to do so. Working from a novella by Denis Johnson, Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar (“Sing Sing”) tell a story of an ordinary life in an extraordinary way, a man who believed his existence was shackled by guilt and trauma. A birth-to-death character study, “Train Dreams” is a meditation on the beauty of everyone and everything, how we are connected to both the earth and those who walked it before us.