‘Train Dreams’ and the magic of the ordinary

Clint Bentley's film, starring Joel Edgerton, is a mysterious and intimate frontier story

- Uday Bhatia

There’s a scene I often return to in Apur Sansar (1959), the third in Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, that’s an eloquent defence of ordinariness. On a nighttime walk, Apu (Soumitra Chatterjee) is gently pulled up by a friend for his lack of ambition. He ventures that he’s writing a novel, and starts narrating the story: a boy grows up in the village, moves to the city, studies hard. “We feel he has in him seeds of greatness, but... he doesn’t succeed?” the friend guesses. “He doesn’t,” Apu replies. “But to him this isn’t a tragedy. He realises one must face reality. One must live!”

Robert Grainier wouldn't be able to articulate this, but he'd agree. He’s a little boy at the start of Clint Bentley's Train Dreams, in a tiny town in rural Idaho. “He quit attending school in his early teens, and the next two decades passed without much direction or purpose,” the voiceover says. He becomes a logger, and though he works a few other jobs, that’s the only real profession he has. He’s in his 80s when the film closes, and has lived most of his life in the same small town.