Train Dreams ★★★
- 2filmcritics
- 11 minutes ago
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Availability: Showing in some theaters as part of Oscar nominee offerings; available on Netflix. For future wider purchase and rental and streaming, see JustWatch here.
“Deep Thoughts”
Despite its ethereal quality, director Clint Bentley’s “Train Dreams” has a plot. At the center of the story is Robert Grainier, a shy man when we meet him, without a past and of indeterminate age (the 50-year-old Australian Joel Edgerton hardly ages in 70 years on screen and never seems young), with no knowledge of his parents, orphaned as a boy. He finds work with other loners in mining camps, railroad construction gangs, and—what will be his life’s work—as a lumberjack in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest.
In "Train Dreams," the lumber camp is not a particularly social space
and is inhabited mostly by men of few words. At the same time
it can be a site of philosophizing, here by Arn (William Macy).
Though his adult life appears to span most of the first 7 decades of the 20th century, Grainier is pre-industrial. The wooden railroad trestle he helps build will soon be abandoned, replaced by a concrete structure; though he dies in the late 1960s, he “never had a firearm, never used a phone”; he’s often seen with an ax over his shoulder.
Life is good—too good, one suspects—except for those months when Robert is away at the “cut,” downing big trees and severing the family.
Oh, yes, the plot: Robert meets Gladys (Felicity Jones, nominated for Best Supporting Actress Oscar for “The Brutalist” [2024]). They fall in love. They plan and build a log-cabin home on the banks of the Moyie River in the Idaho Panhandle, a long walk from the nearest town. They have a daughter, Katie, on whom they dote. Life is good—too good, one suspects—except for those months when Robert is away at the “cut,” downing big trees and severing the family. They miss each other. Tragedy strikes during Robert’s absence. Bereaved, he struggles with isolation, guilt (though he does not dwell on regrets), and an overwhelming emptiness, while somehow holding on to the hope (as will many viewers) that something will happen to make him happy again.
Life is good at the cabin in the forest where the Grainier family lives: Gladys (Felicity Jones), Robert (Joel Edgerton), and their daughter Katie.
There’s much in Robert’s life that’s horrific—not just the tragedy that greeted him upon his return, but other events that haunt him: a Chinese railroad worker, hurled to his death off the bridge they built (the worker’s face is one of the “train dreams” Robert experiences); Apostle Frank (Paul Schneider), the too-talkative preacher in the logging camp, shot in revenge by a stranger; a fellow logger, killed by a “snag” (a dead portion of a tree) rather than by the inherently dangerous work the men do. For Robert, none of these events has meaning, at least not the sort of meaning that would allow him to get even a tentative grip on the meaning of his own difficult life. On the “why?”
The film’s final scene has Robert, aloft as a passenger in a biplane, the film’s narrator expressing the feelings of the man of few words: “at last he felt connected to it all.”
The film’s final scene has Robert, aloft as a passenger in a biplane, the film’s narrator (Will Paton) expressing the feelings of the man of few words: “at last he felt connected to it all.” What “Train Dreams,” and the 2011 Denis Johnson “beloved” novella on which it is based, offers is connection, and not of the most obvious sort. At the height of Robert’s grief, Ignatius Jack (Nathaniel Arcand), the Indian owner of the town’s general store, befriends him. The “connection” Ignatius Jack facilitates is not the friendship he offers, but a conversation about stray dogs, who appear to be half wolf, that have wandered into Robert’s life. Together, the 2 men debate and imagine a possible connection between 2 different species.
Robert (Edgerton) and Gladys (Jones) find love in the Idaho woods.
Similarly, Claire Thompson (Kerry Condon, nominated for Best Supporting Actress Oscar for “The Banshees of Inisherin” [2022]), who comes to the area to staff a fire tower, appears to be part of the plot (a new friend, a possible mate, a soul sister). Instead, like Ignatius Jack, she is there to focus attention on the forest. His response—as he gazes out with her from the top of the tower—is “it’s all so small,” where hers is on the greatness of what she sees. She expresses what for Robert is inchoate: a sense of connection to something outside of himself.
That connection—between Robert and the trees he has spent years chopping down—is articulated more particularly by Arn (William Macy), a fellow logger who feels personally bound to the 500-year-old trees he and Robert have helped fell. Arn likens logging to an act of war with another species, a violation of a natural system, of nature itself.
The connections the film posits are neither obvious nor easy to embrace as the way to understand the awful stuff life can bring on.
All but the most cerebral of movie-goers will find this a thin porridge of ideas. Unlike pantheism, the belief that equates God with the laws of nature and the universe, the doctrine that underlies “Train Dreams” has no room for God, and the natural world it visually offers isn’t particular awe-inspiring (no monumental mountains, the rather ordinary site of the Grainiers’ cabin). The connections the film posits are neither obvious nor easy to embrace as the way to understand the awful stuff life can bring on. Perhaps the message will have meaning as a salve for a fractured society (our own), its factions in almost daily civil combat. We are still throwing the Chinaman off the bridge.
What Robert Grainier wanted was more than and less than a philosophic remedy for existential despair. What he wanted was what he had, and what he lost. In narrative terms, he wanted more of a story, and more from the characters within it, to sustain him. He wanted more plot.
But then “Train Dreams” isn’t really about Grainier. Or is it? That tension—between story and idea, between the concreteness of what the central character desires and the immaterial, metaphysical nature of concepts this simple man can barely grasp—ripples through the film, bringing to it a sense of mystery and indeterminacy, a messy set of “deep thoughts” that can be irritating and vexing, but is, above all, its great strength.
He says: I don’t buy the solution the film offers to Robert’s trauma, but I admire the effort to recast and complicate what would otherwise be a familiar story.
She says: Contemplative? Usually not the pleasure I’d pick. While avoiding the excesses of New-agey, it also doesn’t quite do enough for me—neither the novella nor the film.
Date: 2025
Director: Clint Bentley
Starring: Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, William Macy, Nathaniel Arcand, Kerry Condon, Paul Schneider, Will Paton (voice)
Country: United States
Language: English
Runtime: 102 minutes
Oscar Nominations: Best Motion Picture of the Year, Best Adapted Screenplay (Bentley and Greg Kwedar), Best Cinematography (Adolpho Veloso), Best Song (Nick Cave and Bryce Dessner)
Other Nominations: 23 wins, 157 other nominations