Joel Edgerton is getting the best reviews of his career for Train Dreams, and with good reason. Clint Bentley’s powerful, melancholy drama — for my money the best film of the year — tells the life story of one man and remains intently focused on its mostly passive central character throughout. So much of the picture plays out on Edgerton’s face that by the end, this actor, who has been working pretty much nonstop for the past quarter of a century, feels inseparable from this character. It’s like somehow the rest of his career has ceased to exist.
Which is a stunning development, really, because this man has been in huge films. The Australian actor got his big break playing Owen Lars, the nascent Uncle Owen of the Star Wars series, in Attack of the Clones; he showed up in King Arthur (not that one, the other one) and Exodus: Gods and Kings (for which he wound up in the middle of a casting controversy) and The Great Gatsby and Smokin’ Aces; I could have sworn he was in Black Hawk Down but no, turns out he was in Zero Dark Thirty. Indeed, for years, it was hard to pin down Edgerton as a performer. Was he a leading man, a character actor, a turbo-loaded supporting player? He wasn’t quite a movie star (and showed little interest in being one), but like most movie stars he rarely strayed from a highly specific range. He was the quiet, stony guy, sturdy when good and immovable when villainous. Some of his best parts came in roles that played his restraint off more flamboyant co-stars: He makes a solid foil for Chiwetel Ejiofor’s drag queen in Julian Jarrold’s Kinky Boots, and in Gavin O’Connor’s once super-underrated (but now rightly beloved) Warrior, he’s thoroughly compelling as the struggling, subdued high-school teacher who winds up in the same MMA tournament as his unhinged war-vet brother (played by Tom Hardy).
For years, Edgerton’s anti-charisma has been the opposite of what we expect from leading men. We shouldn’t be able to take our eyes off them, but he plays characters who might be easy to miss. In his early career, that often resulted in roles that made little impression, but over the years it has become one of his unique strengths. For all his clearly enormous talent, Edgerton has only in the past decade or so gained the gravitas that allows him to truly embrace these haunted characters — not just to play them but to become them. Before Train Dreams, his most impressive achievement might have been writing, directing, and co-starring in The Gift (2015), a psychological thriller that manages to be a real psychological thriller and not just an action movie or a horror flick masquerading as one. There, he plays “Gordo the Weirdo,” a mostly forgotten and oddball high-school friend who may or may not be exacting unspeakable psychic revenge on a wonderfully smug Jason Bateman. The film puts Edgerton’s general anonymity and unreadability to great use: We spend pretty much the entire picture wondering what’s going through his mind. The Gift suggests that Joel Edgerton the director understands how best to use Joel Edgerton the actor.
He followed that up the following year with Jeff Nichols’s Loving, in which he brings a submerged constancy to the real-life role of rural working-class Virginian Richard Loving, whose marriage to a Black woman (Ruth Negga, in one of her best performances) led to a landmark 1967 Supreme Court ruling. Edgerton’s character is a humble, silent sort — so much so that the racists around him think that he’s just too dumb to understand that interracial marriage is illegal. The film is a historical drama but its austerity gives it an admirable, present-tense kick. Nichols stays fixed on the very modest, ordinary couple at the story’s heart, and Edgerton’s matter-of-fact reserve — he’s marrying this woman because he loves her, yet he also feels quiet shame that he has to put her through this ordeal — is both authentic and moving.
Edgerton never seems to stop working, and he has also continued to write and direct (he co-wrote the Timothée Chalamet historical epic The King and wrote and directed the 2019 drama Boy Erased), so one suspects that he’d like to spend more time behind the camera. Train Dreams is a case of the stars fully aligning on a project. Edgerton (who has an executive-producer credit on the film) has said that he read Denis Johnson’s novella around the time of its 2011 publication and even inquired into the rights back then. But it wasn’t until many years later that he connected with director Bentley, by which point he had also become a father and entered what now appears to be a new stage of his career. The character of Robert Grainier ages from childhood to his 80s over the course of the picture, so the age of the actor ultimately shouldn’t matter that much — and yet it’s hard to imagine Edgerton doing this part in his 30s.
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As he’s gotten older, however, he has become a more memorable onscreen presence, his middle-age face now a mesmerizing landscape of regret. In Paul Schrader’s brilliant 2022 thriller Master Gardener, Edgerton plays a recovering white-supremacist assassin who turned government witness and is now trying to live a life of quiet anonymity; as his past starts to reemerge and he finds himself pushed to extremes, we see him struggle with his inner violence. Here is another passive character — the kind of thing they tell you to avoid in Filmmaking 101 classes and probably Acting 101 classes too — and yet he captivates with the subtlest acting touches.
One of the things modern actors struggle with the most is conveying genuine thought onscreen. Especially if the dialogue isn’t there to express these inner conflicts, performers flail: They either do too much and wind up looking freakish, or they do too little and start to seem stilted or somnolent. Because the trick is to never let us fully know what the person is thinking; that would undo the mystery of the character. Our understanding should only go about halfway. That hasn’t lent itself well to blockbusters, which usually demand that things be spelled out in big, bold cinematic fashion (that’s just one reason why Edgerton’s turn as Ramses in Exodus was so frustrating), but it’s the engine that holds most great dramas together. As well as some not-so-great dramas: The same year as Master Gardener, Edgerton played an undercover cop in the Australian thriller The Stranger, in which he posed as a hardened criminal trying to gain the confidence of a drifter played by Sean Harris so as to get him to confess to a horrific crime committed years ago. Buried behind a burly beard, Edgerton is borderline opaque; he’s often backlit or presented in harsh profiles that rarely let us see his full face. And the less we can tell, the more we want to know. The movie doesn’t always work, but when it does, it’s mostly because of Edgerton. The actor now does this over and over again, in film after film, and somehow makes it all look effortless.
I first saw Train Dreams at Sundance earlier this year. It wowed me then, but I keep returning to it and being even more impressed and moved by it. And I can’t shake the image of Edgerton’s sad visage, which we often experience in close-up. His character is a logger who doesn’t know (or much care) who his real parents were; he’s not an educated man or a particularly industrious or ambitious one. In other words, he is not a person about whom stories are usually written. The magic of Train Dreams — with its gather-round-the-fire-style narration and almost epic sweep — is the way it lends mythic grandeur to the story of a largely unremarkable man. This is also why it’s so powerful: because this confused, quietly-suffering individual is a lot closer to us than all the brazen activists and suffering artists and blazing racers and throbbing lovers and supernatural beings that populate most movies. And it requires an actor of uncommon artistry and magnetism to make it all work. If once upon a time Joel Edgerton was merely a familiar face, he has now become something altogether different: an unforgettable presence.
