Evoking a Pacific Northwest past, ‘Train Dreams’ stirs a plaintive elegy

TORONTO (AP) — It’s popular in Hollywood to follow the tax credits wherever they go, but that was never going to be much of an option for “Train Dreams.”

When director Clint Bentley embarked on adapting Denis Johnson ’s 2011 novella, he knew the book’s early 20th century Idaho and Washington setting would take him into the Pacific Northwest forests. Johnson’s book is a small miracle: a slender and quiet tale of the simple life of a logger and railroad worker named Robert Grainier. He’s a small, almost infinitesimal piece in a larger drama of time’s march forward and the inexorable maw of progress cutting through an untamed landscape.

In scouting for “Train Dreams,” Bentley, 40, found it harder than ever to find the old growth forests of the book. If “Train Dreams” is about unearthing a f