Train Dreams

In Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, trains seem to represent both progress and destruction, bringing people to far-out places while also dividing them from each other. A train takes Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) to and from his seasonal work as a logger in upstate Washington and brings him back home at the end of the season, home to his wife, Gladys (Felicity Jones), and young daughter, Kate. It means work and money, but it also means isolation from the ones he loves. His work is dangerous, and people die all the time while doing it. For this reason, he doesn’t want Gladys and his daughter to accompany him to the site, preferring to face the danger alone. 

The film spans generations of time, but, unlike most such films, we only spend the vast majority of it with Robert, seeing him growing old yet never moving on. He is a man who has lost himself after losing the most important things in his life and, up until the very end, he never really finds himself again, preferring to stay in place and internalize his grief and blame for a senseless tragedy that he shares no blame in. But that’s exactly how grief works sometimes. It creates doubts and second-guessing along with a healthy dose of survivor’s guilt for those who are left behind. We can’t help it but it is in our nature to feel this way.

In this film, we meet Robert as a young man as he courts Gladys, marries her, and builds a life for the two of them. They have a daughter, and to pay the bills, he leaves for large periods of time to take the dangerous job of logging because safer work is hard to find in the USA during the time of World War I. He comes home and is a loving and caring husband and father, spending as much time as he can with his family before having to pack up again and return to the forest. One return trip, though, he comes back to find the area where he lives in is on fire, the woods engulfed in flames. In a panic, he runs through it to his home only to find it, too, is burning to the ground, with no sign of his family anywhere. Once the flames are extinguished, he remains, hoping Gladys and Kate will return but knowing that they are gone forever. 

From there, the film follows him as he navigates his grief, eventually giving up logging and never quite giving up hoping that one day his family will show up again, though he knows that they are dead. Some nights he dreams of them, and some nights he dreams of that train that separated them all those years ago. In one of the more poignant moments late in the film, he meets Claire Thompson (Kerry Condon), a forestry services worker whose husband died from a long illness. Her words of encouragement help comfort him during his deepest bouts of despair, offering him a friendly voice while he feels his most lost. Eventually, he takes a trip up to Spokane, Washington, where he witnesses John Glenn’s historic space flight on a television and takes his own flight in a biplane to “see the world as the birds see it.” He leaves the world with no family, no heirs, but in that one moment, as he rode in the air, we are told that “as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt, at last, connected to it all.”

This is Joel Edgerton at his best, giving us a performance that is so heartbreaking and visceral that we mourn for him even as he mourns. It’s not easy to portray this kind of grief without costars to bounce off of, and it can be easy to just come across as melodramatic. There are layers to this grief, too, that are fascinating to see play out on screen. At first, he is outwardly projecting that grief, crying out loud in his sorrow. Then he just shuts down, lying on the ground and not even reacting to the elements around him like a man willing God to just take him too. When a friendly face, Ignatius Jack (Nathaniel Arcand), finds him there lying in the mud, he professes that he was afraid of what he would find when he got there. There is no real comfort for this kind of loss but a friendly face and some company. Robert is grateful for both and it gets him out of the mud and some food in his stomach, but he never really recovers from his loss. Gladys and Kate are missing, their bodies not found in the destruction of their home, and he never gives up his hope that they will come back despite his vivid imaginations of what their final moments might have been. 

We are connected to this earth, all of us. The trees around us were there before us, many for hundreds of years, and the removal of any one of them is like pulling a thread in this great tapestry, the results of which we cannot fathom. Arn Peeples (William H. Macy) opines about this philosophy to his fellow loggers one evening after the deaths of several of his friends through a logging accident. He feels the destruction of nature with the laying of the train tracks and the logging of the trees, not knowing that such will be his own fate, too. Others believe that there are so many trees that no matter how many are cut down, by the time you get to the end, new ones will have sprung up to take their place. Such an idea was prevalent in World War I era United States, but of course, such thinking is folly. What is cut down can never fully be recovered, and what replaces it will never quite be the same. 

In the grand scheme of things, Robert is not an extraordinary man. But he was a kind and loving man, and in that way, he was extraordinary. His life was limited by his own belief that he was shackled by his guilt and trauma. It kept him from moving on with his life, finding love again, and rebuilding that life. He builds his home in the woods, complete with his wife and daughter. When those things are taken from him, he rebuilds the home again in the exact same spot the old one was, refusing to move on in some vain hope that they will come back to him someday. In a scene late in the film, he is awakened by what he thinks is Kate, returned to him in the night, injured and in need of care. When he awakens in the morning, she is gone, the window over the bed left ajar as if she crept out into the woods again in the night. Was this real or just in his mind? Was this Kate or just his wishful imaginings? The film leaves that to our own thoughts. 

Because Robert is often silent and introspective, the film falls back on narration to interpret some of it for us. In lesser films, this can come across as shorthand, but here it provides us with a great deal of information that couldn’t otherwise be gleaned from seeing Robert so shut out and closed to the world around him. Will Patton provides the voice of the narrator, and that voice is both powerful and soothing as it accompanies the imagery around it. Patton, like Morgan Freeman, could narrate a phone book and make it worth the listen. In the final narrations, we learn that Robert never really opened himself up to people again, though we never see him actively pushing people away, and he dies alone in his cabin, the date not even known. We see that plant life had already taken hold inside the cabin, enveloping the bed and walls. He died alone with no family, no heirs, no fanfare. Just an ordinary man at the end of his life.

It is always impressive when a film comes to an end and we can sit back and contemplate for a time what it all means. Most of us don’t suffer the tragedies of losing a spouse and a child at so young an age, and we take that for granted. Such a loss would destroy us, uproot us from our lives. Many of us would end up like Robert, obsessed with that loss and unable or unwilling to move on; it’s our nature. To see it portrayed so eloquently and so thoughtfully through a combination of first-rate writing and directing, accompanied by a career-high performance by a talented and often underestimated actor like Joel Edgerton, is inspiring and very moving. This is the power of filmmaking when it is firing on all cylinders, harnessing the emotional depths that make us humans and bring us together, bind us together in this world. We know not what pulling out a single thread in the tapestry of our lives will do, but it will change things, in big ways or small, forever.

Academy Award Nominations:

Best Picture: Marissa McMahon, Teddy Schwarzman, Will Janowitz, Ashley Schlaifer, and Michael Heimler

Best Adapted Screenplay: Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar

Best Cinematography: Adolpho Veloso

Best Original Song: Train Dreams - Music by Nick Cave and Bryce Dessner; lyrics by Cave

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Release Date: November 7, 2025

Running Time: 102 minutes

Rated PG-13

Starring: Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, Nathaniel Arcand, Clifton Collins Jr., John Diehl, Paul Schneider, Kerry Condon, and William H. Macy

Directed by: Clint Bentley