Directed by Clint Bentley | Written by Bentley and Greg Kwedar, based on a novella by Denis Johnson | 102 min | ▲▲▲▲ | Netflix

Here’s a stunner, another in Netflix’s solid selection of films coming out this fall — we didn’t get it in cinemas here, but now it’s available on the streamer. It’s about a logger over the course of his 80 years living in the woods, the hard work, small joys, and terrible tragedies of his ordinary life, presented in a way that feels both epic and intimate. It’s poetic and cuts deep.

We meet Robert Grainier as a child in the late 19th century, an orphan who didn’t know what happened to his parents or even his actual age or birthday.  As an adult he’s played by Joel Edgerton, who circa the First World War meets a woman named Gladys (Felicity Jones), and they make a home along a river near Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho and have a baby named Kate. Robert makes his living travelling to logging operations for months at a time, lawless places where the workers have no rights. He witnesses a Chinese worker (Alfred Hsing) thrown off a bridge by three white men for no reason, and the man’s ghost haunts him.

Robert’s uneducated, with no real sense of himself or the world, but has a philosophical spirit. He worries whether his mistakes, the “bad things he’s done,” follow him through his life. He finds happiness in his family life, though, as a father and a husband.

We know this because the movie has a omniscient narrator telling us this — Robert’s not super expressive. As a storytelling technique this is one of the worst, but somehow it’s forgivable here. That’s partly due to the literary bent of the script, and partly due to the nature of this story — a whimsical indie western, a lot more Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven than, say, the egregious Nick Offerman v/o in The Life of Chuck. 

This is a lovely looking film, too, another certain debt to Malick, though the Academy ratio frame works against the film’s attention on the natural beauty of landscape. Bentley is determined to shoot at magic hour, and he loves to block his actors with the sunset over their shoulders — it makes for a beautiful vibe, but as we go along it gets a little repetitive and self-conscious. Strangely, given the span of time encompassed by the film we only once, briefly, see Robert in a wintry environment, a moment that recalls Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson.

That said, Train Dreams can’t help but hypnotize, generating a powerful sense of dread pushed by some creative foreshadowing, tightly edited montages of trains moving through smoke at night, and sudden wildfire. That and soulful performances by a terrific set of performers, the ones already mentioned — I predict award attention for Edgerton — but also William H Macy as a munitions expert working alongside Robert, Nathaniel Arcand as a local business owner and friend to Robert during the hard times, and Kerry Condon as a forest protection worker.

Taken as a whole, the film does something nearly impossible: it makes make sense of a person’s essential goodness in a story told over decades, flecked with streaks of beauty, joy, and terrible grief.