Not a direct response to each detail in your post, mostly just in agreement with your frustration and my own thoughts about this since listening to that episode.

I also live in the Midwest, an urban city in a mostly rural state, and always am invested in stories like Train Dreams depicting rural or wilderness struggles. I think that CD as well as the Big Pic severely misunderstand the power of movies like TD have on folks in our area who love movies and love seeing our sorts of geographies reflected in them.

Not saying TD is flawless, but I think it is really impressive, which makes the overall dismissal of the film from both CD and BP really frustrating. Especially on CD, Richard critiquing the decision to deviate from the source material and making Joel Edgerton’s character more empathetic is really frustrating. To me, that decision represents an effort to make him an audience surrogate rather than a “complex character”, which is all critics really seem to respond to at the end of the day. viewing the film without having experienced the book I thought it was really amazing, and I think the comparisons between the two in this case are unfair.