Or, the Roger’s experience of America’s making
Train Dreams
a film directed by Clint Bentley and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, September 4–14, 2025
Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams—an adaptation of Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella of the same title—has the same sentimentality and prodigious lens flare as an Ozempic advertisement. It’s important to establish that Johnson’s Train Dreams is a deeply uncomfortable narrative wherein the mechanisms of America’s flawed nation-building cope with the lifelessness of their actions, and that Bentley’s Train Dreams is a lifeless mechanism of America’s flawed nation-building. To be honest, I found this movie utterly irredeemable. Each successive shot is abrupt, clumsy, castrated, and most importantly, fucking tiring. Even when the credits finally started to roll, there was no sense of reprieve. Writing this review also failed to provide any cathartic release into some supremely smug state of being. It’s just another awful movie being added to Netflix later this year.
At their best, the performances are distracting. There’s this Brechtian quality to Joel Edgerton’s somewhat dull dissipation into the taming of the frontier that is, unfortunately, subverted by the trappings of developing a readymade ‘moving portrait of a railroad worker.’ His character is inexplicably progressive on issues of race and sex, which I found to be an odd screenwriting decision, since the novella opens with this same character attempting to toss a Chinese labourer over a bridge. In the movie, he carries himself with total obliviousness to all colonial hierarchy, and so, when racial violence does occur (once), it can be rationalised into a very conventional notion of narrative progress. Edgerton’s character is unsettled by the human cost of constructing frontier infrastructure, which never festers into any interesting political anxiety; it just means it saddens him when other men die. Brilliant. And then he dies too? Masterful. At least the novella remains readable and worthwhile.