Train Dreams spans decades and yet remains steadfastly modest. As directed by Clint Bentley, the film has a grand sense of visual sweep, making vast, untamed landscapes into magnificent images under the eye of cinematographer Adolpho Veloso. Even so, it is also resolutely contained, fully committed to honoring the perceptions of the lead character, a taciturn workingman named Robert Grainier (played impeccably by Joel Edgerton). Bentley worked with Greg Kwedar, his usual creative partner, to adapt Denis Johnson’s affecting novel of the same name. The screenwriters allow for some gentle acknowledgement that Robert’s journey echoes those of countless toiling individuals who thanklessly helped build America across the first two-thirds or so of the twentieth century. The film excels, however, become of how specifically it is one man’s story, in all its joy and sadness. Others intersect with him and share parts of themselves; it becomes part of his own patchwork of being as he borrows pieces of their understanding, their philosophies, their hearts, their souls. Train Dreams offers no real epiphanies or resounding statements of purpose. Its elegance in taking in a person as he takes in the world is reason enough. Robert exists, and that is a triumph. It is not tragedy, comedy, or melodrama. It is simply life, and it endures until it doesn’t.