Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams is a quiet film — a meditative frontier portrait defined as much by its silences as by its sweeping Northwest landscapes and its attention to the everyday rhythms of a working man’s life. For star Joel Edgerton and cinematographer Adolpho Veloso, that quiet is where the truth of Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella lived, where the dignity, terror, humor and memory of a man’s journey reside.

“It kind of shows the majesty of a regular life, in a way,” says Edgerton of the film, which follows Robert Grainier, a logger living in the early 20th century, from early adulthood to his final years. “We’re used to going to the cinema to watch the lives of characters that save the world. … This is a different kind of cinema experience. The majesty of ordinariness, I think,

See Full Page