Train Dreams — 3/5
Joel Edgerton stars as A Decent, Hard-Working Man Whose Love Was Pure And Whose Life Was Marked By Loss. It aims to be be Pretty™, and achieves it, sure, even if the result is just one large dead girlfriend montage. But as a resonant, emotional movie, it fails on its two recurring themes. "Does this act of innocent ignorance curse my life?" haunts him until it disappears totally. "Does this man's life in totality have meaning?" is only really brought up by the narrator, who gives the movie a feeling that it wants to be more whimsical than it is. Where it succeeds, though, is operating at that place between "this is the old world" and "this is the new world." Old tools, hard times become new tools, easier times, in a blink. You could have told me this movie was based in the 1850s until suddenly we're in the 1920s. It's that feeling of "gradually, and then suddenly." You're in a forest, and then the forest is gone, and you were too busy chopping down all the trees to notice. And in the way the movie moves you through that forest, you can understand how people get lost in the world. Take your eyes off of it for a second, and it's gone.
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