If you didn’t know that movies take way longer to make than a single year, you’d think someone at Netflix watched Oscar-winner The Brutalist last year and then instantly commissioned Train Dreams, which just got its first trailer for the platform.
It’s got the square-format film ratio, the troubled male protagonist struggling with what seems like an insurmountable and mountainous task, and it’s even got Felicity Jones as his long-suffering but loyal wife. That’s surface-level stuff, of course, but I was struck by the similarities.
Putting them aside, though, Train Dreams still looks like a potentially staggering bit of work. It stars Joel Edgerton as a fictional logger from the turn of the 20th century, called Robert Grainier. Grainier plays witness to small episodes that encapsulate much of what happened in America at that time.
He’ll eventually settle down after a live of roving (which starts as an orphan), with Felicity Jones and an adorable daughter to raise, but there should be plenty of drama before then. From this teaser, it looks like the many perils of logging and working on the railroad are all going to come into sharp focus.
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The movie will be directed by Clint Bentley, and co-written by him and Greg Kwedar, who have collaborated to huge success before on the Oscar-nominated script for Sing Sing. There’s nothing more reassuring than a creative team that stays together like this, as Netflix doubtless knew when it invested in the project.
You can tell when Netflix has a film it believes in, pretty easily in fact: it submits it for an actual cinema release, if only for a week, so that it qualifies for awards consideration. That’s what it’s planning for Train Dreams, which will be in some cinemas from 7 November before it hits streaming on 21 November.
