Joel Edgerton reveals how new Netflix film could get close to answering the meaning of life

Train Dreams – which comes to Netflix tomorrow (Friday 21st November) – is not your typical streaming film.

The decades-spanning drama stars Joel Edgerton as an ordinary man living in the Pacific Northwest in the early part of the 20th century, at a time when the US was rapidly changing. Although plenty of major things – including some traumatic incidents – happen over the course of his life, the film's gentle, patient approach more or less completely eschews melodrama in favour of a more considered, meditative approach.

Speaking exclusively to RadioTimes.com at the London Film Festival last month, Edgerton had some pretty major claims to make about the potential impact of the movie, which is based on the late Denis Johnson's 2011 novella of the same name.

"Well, I think the book – and now the film – gets close to, not giving us an answer to what the meaning of life is... but it's definitely rich with ruminations around, 'What is the meaning of a life?'" he explained. "And if you're lucky to have a long life and all of its experiences, what does it all add up to?

"That was very potent to me in the novella, the idea that it was a Western that was not a violent, vengeful tale like we might know as a Western. But a meditative and very philosophical examination of a very potent but ordinary life – and yet it's imbued with such meaning."

Another aspect of the story which immediately stuck out to Edgerton was the manner in which it explored the relationship between humanity and nature, with the star explaining that he often has to remind himself "how disconnected I can be from the planet that I live on".

"Human beings, we use the planet," he explained. "We really use it, and we chew it up, rather than, as indigenous cultures do, feel like they belong to the land. There's a lot of things that really felt very potent to me, that I felt struck a chord.”

When an aspiring writer is searching for advice, one of the first things they are often told is that their protagonist should be a driver of the action – that they should actively move things forward rather than merely passively reacting to circumstances around them.

What makes Train Dreams so interesting is that it very much takes the opposite approach, something which in its own way also ties in to the aforementioned exploration of nature. Indeed, Felicity Jones told RadioTimes.com that she thought of Edgerton's character as "an old tree" who is "withstanding so much trauma and being blown about".

"There's a quietness to the character and an introspection," she explained. "He's kind of an observer of the world. But then it's also cut with this violence... there's a lot of death throughout the film. So it's a fascinating combination that it's quite blunt about the facts of life, and how do you deal with these terrible things that can happen in your life, how do you find a route through that?

"So I think that combination of there is a stillness and a peacefulness but, like nature, there are moments of terrible destruction and damage."

Meanwhile, for writer/director Bentley – who was previously a co-writer on the hugely acclaimed Sing Sing – the idea for the film was simply to "represent life as a lot of us live it".

He explained: "Most of us are not stopping a bank robbery or making some big invention that's going to change the world. And yet, the first time I fell in love... I remember how deep that feeling was, or the first time I lost a parent, how awful that was.

"And those are big, big emotions and big things that dictate all of our lives, whether we lead a cinematic life or not. And that was always the thing that I hoped would come across in the movie."

Train Dreams is streaming on Netflix from Friday 21st November 2025.

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