Train Dreams

Director Clint Bentley

director on the set with Joel Edgerton

novelist Denis Johnson

TRAIN DREAMS      B                                                                                                           USA  (102 mi)  2025  d: Clint Bentley

There were once passageways to the old world; strange trails, hidden paths.  You’d turn a corner and suddenly find yourself face-to-face with the great mystery, the foundation of all things.  And even though that old world is gone now, even though it’s been rolled up like a scroll and put somewhere, you can still feel the echo of it.                                                             —opening narration (Will Patton)

Adapted from a 108-page novella by Denis Johnson, initially appearing in The Paris Review in 2002 before published on its own in 2011, one of three works of fiction nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2012, along with David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia, but in a controversial decision no book was awarded the prize that year, the first time in 35 years.  His 1986 novel was also the source material for the Claire Denis film Stars at Noon (2022), which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, another film about isolation and existentialism.  Set in the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the 20th century with the building of the transcontinental railroads, forest loggers met with railroad men to tame the American West, falling trees in abundance, literally carving out sides of mountains to make way for the coming future, opening up pockets of America’s Western frontier to expansion in a bid to interconnect the country, much like the interstate highway system did for cars in the 1950’s.  Using a blurred effect that reads like “a waking dream,” much as he did in his earlier much-celebrated short story collection Jesus’ Son in 1992, using unsettling, dreamlike qualities to express a state of mind preoccupied by deeper, metaphysical accounts of the changing world around them, with the film using lengthy voiceover narration passages, which many compare to the pervasive transcendental style of Terrence Malick, especially 2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #1 The Tree of Life, as it moves from realism into the metaphysical and back, navigating a line between truth and the American frontier myth.  Deeply contemplative, this is like an early David Gordon Green movie, George Washington (2000) or All the Real Girls (2003), the kind of thing nobody makes anymore (including Green), like an ancient relic, or a lone tree dwarfed by the massive overgrowth of the surrounding woods, as it places the poetry of mood and atmosphere over any narrative coherence, with the natural beauty of the landscapes becoming a character of its own.  Co-written by Bentley and Greg Kwedar, beautifully shot almost entirely outdoors, by Brazilian cinematographer Adolpho Veloso, where the strength of the film is the natural surroundings in an elegiac portrait of Robert Grainier, Australian actor Joel Edgerton, from David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom (2010), Jeff Nichols’ Loving (2016), and Barry Jenkins’ 2021 #2 Film of the Year The Underground Railroad- made for TV (2021), who is a simple man living in the mountains of northern Idaho near the Canadian border, making his living as a logger before transitioning to working for the railroad.  Immediately we are introduced to unsettling racist and xenophobic elements of the American Dream, namely those who were deprived from participating, as relentless and unending violence eradicated many of the Chinese laborers in a form of a deeply disturbing ethnic cleansing, witnessing the mass deportation of a hundred or more Chinese families, while often violently killing these Asian laborers in plain sight of the others, accused of alleged crimes before subjecting them to mob justice.  Ghostly visions of one murdered man, Fu Sheng (Alfred Hsing), continually flashes in the head of Grainier, who “was baffled by the casualness of the violence,” whose guilt haunts him for the rest of his life, posing the question, “Do you think the bad things we do follow us in life?,” leading him to suspect that he is subject to some obscure curse that follows him through the rest of his days and haunts his dreams, like the recurrence of traumatic damage, a reminder of the perils that come with the forming of a new frontier, which is anything but civilized, as the killings go unpunished.  The film pulls back from the most unforgiving elements of the novella’s critique, where contemporary climate disasters are essentially coupled with the long histories of settler colonialism and racial violence that epitomizes the American frontier.  

In the beginning, Grainier grows close to a man named Arn Peeples (William H. Macy), an old logger full of stories and an explosives expert who befriends him, where he stands out by not saying much, as opposed to the other endlessly chatty workers who actually have even less to say.  They form a bond that is larger than a friendship, one built on mutual respect and admiration, but Arn succumbs to a falling tree branch that hits him in the head, a notorious forest widowmaker that immediately reminds them of the inherent dangers of working in the woods.  His death is marked by nailing his boots to the tree, a poetic tribute that only accentuates how easily things can go wrong working under such primitive conditions, yet that’s also one of the reason jobs are so plentiful, as the hazards can outweigh the benefits, so the work really only attracts single men unattached to families.  Grainier drifts from job to job until he meets Gladys (Felicity Jones, so effective in Brady Corbet’s 2025 Top Ten List #3 The Brutalist) one Sunday after church, falling immediately head-over-heels in love, and they marry shortly afterwards, building a small cabin in a remote acre of the wilderness along the banks of the Moyie River.  In a film with intense highs and extreme lows, suddenly all he wanted to do was share the rest of his life living in the woods with her, having a young daughter named Kate, but Grainier is a man of few words, defined by facial expressions and long silences, with loneliness etched into his face, offering sparse, yet precise dialogue, where the much more revealing voiceover narration is exquisitely read by actor Will Patton, who also provided narration for the audiobook, giving the film a literary quality, providing greater insight into what we are seeing, with a quiet, unobtrusive, and barely audible musical score written by The National’s Bryce Dessner.  An ode to a vanishing way of life, the film actually recounts 80-years of his life (living into the 1960’s), orphaned as a child, never knowing who his parents were, dropping out of school, wandering from place to place, seemingly directionless until he meets Gladys, and suddenly he has a purpose.  Yet in order to survive, he has to spend long periods of time away from home in order to earn an income, which comes at a cost, as they both feel the wearying effects of his absence, not to mention a child who barely knows her father.  So they hatch a plan to build a lumber mill, allowing him to work closer to home, but in order to finance the project he’s forced into one more logging excursion, which is cut short by apocalyptic visions of fire and smoke billowing into the sky, a raging forest fire literally seen for miles, where the damage swallows up his family and his home, as well as much of the surrounding landscape, all reduced to ashes, yet their loss gives his life meaning, as he refuses to let them go.  Staying on the charred grounds in the event they might happen to return, he remains lost and alone, literally a hermit in the woods, reminiscent of Robert Redford’s survivalist in Sydney Pollack’s JEREMIAH JOHNSON (1972).  In the tradition of 20th century American frontier fiction, like Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918), the novel is darker in tone, told out of order, with a more complicit protagonist who is definitely guilty, with a less than admirable character, refusing explanation at the end, while the film is more linear and ambiguously open-ended, turning the protagonist into an ordinary but exemplary everyman who is our silent witness to the transformation of America in the 20th century, softening the harsh tone to literally questioning the meaning of our existence rather than continually reeling from the devastation erupting all around us.

After such an impactful tragedy, the film leans even more heavily on its visual language, Visuals - Train Dreams (4K) YouTube (4:43), becoming a profound meditation on existence, on grief and loss, and on the great mystery of all things, with lengthy philosophical ruminations expressed through the existential narration.  Finding work transporting goods to and from the railroad, he develops a spiritual friendship with a local Indigenous merchant, Ignatius Jack (Nathaniel Arcand), seemingly his only friend left in the world when he’s down in the dumps, while also meeting another fiercely independent woman who is quite comfortable living alone, Claire (Kerry Condon, from Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, 2022), the first woman to work for the U.S. Forest Service, brought in to survey the aftermath of the devastating fire, living in an elevated fire lookout tower to have a better view of developing forest fires.  Her unique, otherworldly residence takes him by surprise, as does her openly friendly nature, where she seems to understand him better than others, perhaps because she’s had her own experience with death, having lost a husband to a long, protracted illness, Train Dreams | Joel Edgerton and Kerry Condon "Threaded ... YouTube (49 seconds).  Grainier has visions of his wife and daughter, continually walking through the woods where he thinks he can feel their spirits, being very quiet and careful, hoping not to drive them away.  One night he believes he has discovered an injured Kate, now grown up and covered in soot, with a broken leg, cleaning her up while tending to her wounds, but by morning she has disappeared without a trace.  A film about getting swept into the current of incomprehensible change, nature is not just a place of beauty and danger, but watching humans tap into its calm indifference represents a spirit of freedom, offering a poetic space of memory and dreams.  Somber and unromanticized, the language of dreams and reality are interwoven, all blending together, where it’s hard to separate one from the other, which adds a poetic feel to every frame of the film, with Edgerton underplaying every fiber of Grainier’s character, creating a minimalist effect, even though this is an expansive, historical film that weaves its way into the present.  The railroad becomes a symbol of man’s intrusion into nature, a transformation no one can stop, marking progress into modernity, but it too becomes outdated, as wooden bridges across deep river gorges, which were viewed at the time as marvels of engineering, are soon replaced by those made of concrete-and-steel, which is like watching an old world disappear, encapsulating a deep sense of melancholy, becoming not only an elegy for the American West, but a reminder that all our work will eventually become obsolete.  Near the end we see Grainier take a ride on a fixed-wing biplane, which encircles the surrounding forest, allowing him to inspect it from above, providing a unique vantage point, like a God’s-eye view, as events from his life flash through his mind as the plane loops through the air, a reminder that the world keeps changing around him.  In a rare visit to Spokane in 1962, he pauses by a TV screen in a storefront window and witnesses images of astronaut John Glenn in space, allowing him to contemplate his own mortality, while the narrator recounts that Robert died in his sleep in his cabin in November 1968, leaving no heirs, but that on that spring day in the plane, “as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt, at last, connected to it all,” Watch the Final Scene of 'Train Dreams' | Anatomy of a Scene YouTube (2:33).