When writing about movies, it’s best to have a thesaurus at the ready, lest those top shelf words get the better of your piece. You know the ones, printed on every poster, whisked by your retinas in the blink of an eye during every trailer, and so do critics. Terms like ‘powerful,’ ‘extraordinary,’ and ‘tour de force’ aren’t just catch-alls for celluloid achievement; they’re marketing materials unto themselves, with film commenters either wielding them to see their name printed on the latest promotional material, or steering clear as to avoid sounding like an industry shill. A writer’s chosen verbiage has weight, which turns a movie like Train Dreams into a true scribe’s conundrum. Exclusively oriented toward lofty, reverent descriptors, director/co-writer Clint Bentley’s latest is mounted with prehistoric tools, all aimed at awe and heartache, the perfect recipe for scornful derision if the project falls short. Hit your marks, however, and those reviews will have to go back to the basics when it comes to laudatory phrasing.   

Those rudimentary, worshipful syllables won’t be escaping the mouth of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) any time soon, rotting away in the chest cavity of a man who’s more at peace as an observer than orator. A logger in the turn-of-the-century Pacific Northwest, the man we meet in the opening frames is a living manifestation of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transparent Eyeball, silently awash in nature’s gobsmacking grandeur and anonymous cruelty. Only Gladys (Felicity Jones), the woman who becomes his devoted wife mere moments after their acquaintance, is capable of coaxing full sentences out of the lumberjack, but even their swoony interactions favor rosy-cheeked solace over proper elocution. Their moments of hushed embrace soon result in a child, one that Robert can only see during the off-season of his railroad construction gig, his longing for mother and child written in cursive across his expressive glance. 

The years add up right in front of his pensive stare, with Bentley’s screenplay, co-authored by Greg Kwedar and adapted from Dennis Johnson’s novella of the same name, charting 80 years of American progress and industrialization. That unwieldy timeframe is just one of many, many instances wherein Train Dreams risks folding under the pressure of its own all-encompassing, ever-earnest ambitions, but greatness is best pursued without trepidation. Using a modest, solitary man to map out nearly a century’s worth of national growing pains makes comparisons to Forrest Gump all but unavoidable, but where director Robert Zemeckis super-charged his Best Picture winner with era-appropriate pop songs and a protagonist blessed with a superhero’s set of hidden abilities, Bentley is content to let the wind that whispers between tree branches do the talking. There will be no Vietnam War or table tennis championships for Grainier, and he’d likely pass on them if given the chance. He’s a wife guy, a civil simpleton who yearns for nothing more than family life, and everything else is just window dressing.

Or anyone, rather, because Grainier is certainly aware of the woodland majesty that surrounds him, graciously sharing his dumbfounded wonder with the audience. There’s no labeling of cinematographer Adolpho Veloso’s work that doesn’t include the word beautiful, as irrefutable as the obvious influence of Terrence Malick. Poet laureate of the filmic outdoors, the director’s impact and legion of acolytes almost guarantee that any flick opting to linger plaintively on a blade of grass will always exist in his shadow, a case that Bentley doesn’t even try to beat here. He’s a true believer in the church of our earthly mother, and it’s hard to think of a movie since Malick’s own The Tree of Life that captures the natural world in such gorgeous, soaring hues. Your soul melts just looking at the thing, further softened by Bryce Dessner’s sumptuous, elegiac score, a potent tandem that bulldozes pessimism and reluctance, building a road to exaltation in their wake.

Bentley and Kwedar are no strangers to hugging a viewer until it hurts, having teamed up just last year for the treacly Oscars afterthought Sing Sing. That film, directed by Kwedar and chronicling the artistic aspirations of inmates at its titular correctional facility, was far too modern to withstand all the smothering sincerity, contorting real life trauma into user-friendly platitudes as awards season fodder so often does. Train Dreams doesn’t break from the formula so much as relocate it to a much more becoming era, where all the solemnity splits the difference between historical tall tale and primordial allegory. Even their stabs at racial solidarity, so impossibly ham-fisted in Sing Sing, are winsome here, further aligning us with a character whose clarity of conscience fits the material’s ancient pleas for basic decency like a worn-in glove. Dimensionality is necessary when delving into present day trials and tribulations; wind back the clock a few decades, and 2-D renderings start to have the hallowed predominance of drawings on the cave walls.      

Sermonizing of this sort asks an awful lot of the thespians giving it voice, but the cast here is all rowing in the same gentle, unironic direction. Would-be scene stealers like John Diehl, Paul Schneider, and Clifton Collins Jr. allow themselves to be subsumed by the landscape, never threatening the suspension of disbelief, with only a brief but cherished turn from William H. Macy adding anything theatrical to the proceedings. A late-breaking appearance from Kerry Condon represents the lone false actorly note, but the centerpiece scene she shares with Edgerton is the exception that proves the rule. She strains to match the plain-spoken importance of the moment, revealing, by contrast, the astonishing grace of every other performer, handling dialogue that would be gratingly trite if delivered with any less skill. At the head of it all is Edgerton, wholly believable in the film’s yesteryear elements, drawing from an endless well of empathy with only a mumble and a pair of watery corneas. He’s got some things to be misty about.

Tragedy strikes early and often in Train Dreams, and accusations of misery mongering are both well-founded and largely beside the point. To accept what Bentley has built here is to give yourself over to it, as indulgent in melodrama as it is heavenly views of the vast, open plains. The anguish is blessedly truncated, permeating every inch of a 102 minute film that would topple over into a puddle of its own agony if it overstayed its welcome. As is, they seem to waft out of the frame entirely, lingering long after the credits have rolled, patiently residing in the back of your mind like the most vivid of memories. It’s welcoming where other revered movies are imposing, inviting instead of insisting, breathing secrets into your ear that only draw you in closer. Listen closely, and call it what it is: stunning, radiant, moving, and beautiful.