The Train Dreams trailer has just pulled into the station.
Netflix has at last released the trailer for Train Dreams, the much-anticipated adaptation of the late Denis Johnson’s novella. Starring Felicity Jones and Joel Edgerton in what some Sundance viewers have called apex performances, the film is taking a turn about the Toronto International Film Festival before coming to a screen near you in November.
So what’s with this trailer? Adapted by Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley—the writing team behind last year’s Oscar-nominated Sing Sing—the film looks suitably bombastic, to judge from this snippet. We get a lot of sweeping nature shots and pronouncements on the fickle nature of time.
Some of us on staff were reminded, for good or ill, of Terence Malick’s Tree of Life. And if the aphorisms don’t quite capture Johnson’s famous style airlifted out of context, it’s nice to see William H. Macy looking like his truest self—i.e., sad, on a log.
But this jury’s preoccupied with the more important question. Can Train Dreams work on film?
The compact odyssey about the logger Robert Grainier is at once an ode to the end of the frontier and a poetic riff whose power hinges on perfect sentences, always hard to reproduce onscreen. Not to sound like the worst guy at the cocktail party, but I might feel safe about this material were it in Wim Wenders’ hands. But it’s been hard to imagine any film version that does the book justice.
I’ve been wrong before, and annoying forever. So let’s hope this sleek, stunning slice of epic does justice to that other.
Here’s looking at Train Dreams.
