☆☆☆☆☆
Robert Grainier doesn't know who he is. He has no birthday, no parents, no hometown. He has only himself. Most of us aren't like Grainier, the main character in director Clint Bentley's achingly beautiful, exquisite rumination on life, but just because we know our birthday, our parents, our life story doesn't mean we have all that much more than Grainier.
He's a logger in the Pacific Northwest, a man who lives for work, or works to live, much like the rest of us, though his work is on the railway, which is making its way through the wilderness of Washington state in the early 1900s.
Grainier, played by Joel Edgerton with quiet intensity, doesn't know what he wants from life. He's not even sure what he's supposed to want, until he meets Gladys (Felicity Jones) at church one day. They share a vision of what their life together could be, and then they set about to build it — it's not grand, but it's theirs, including a daughter named Kate. For a while, Grainier achieves a happy sort of satisfaction, heading back out for a new job, which is filled with dangers and insights into the vicissitudes of human beings and the world in which they try to make their way.
Life, though, does not go the way Grainier expects it will. Train Dreams follows him on a journey through life that seems, perhaps, small and unimportant, though thanks to stunning cinematography by Adlopho Veloso and a beautiful score by Bryce Dessner, it is in its way a grand and epic life. Grainier would never think it so, but that's one of the things I think Train Dreams is trying to say: We cannot see our lives for what they are, and we cannot see where we fit in the world.
Much later in his life, Grainier meets a woman named Claire (Kerry Condon), who is a forest service worker in the years after World War II. From her perch high above the woods, they look at the land and Claire reminds him that everything serves a purpose. At a distance, it's hard to tell where one thing ends and another begins, and it's clear that even the invisible insects play a role.
It turns out Claire has her own tale to tell. Everyone in Train Dreams does. You can see it in their eyes, hear it in their weary but hopeful voices. But this is one man's story, and by the time he is up there in that lookout tower, he has been beaten down and forgotten what — if anything — he ever wanted to be or achieve.
"The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as it needs a preacher in the pulpit," Claire assures him. Is he heartened by her words? It's hard to tell. But Edgerton's soulful, deeply etched face make it clear they haven't got unheard. Later, much later, Grainier finds something like solace.
It takes a long time to get there — the movie covers a span of nearly 50 years, a half-century in which everything changes, not just for Grainier but in the world at large. This quiet, deliberate drama may seem to some to take nearly the same length of time to play out. It's a slow movie, but never boring; it's quiet, but every frame has something to say.
Train Dreams, like far too many movies these days, deserves, even demands, to be seen on the big screen, not just to appreciate its beauty, but to experience its pace. Most people will find it on Netflix, where they'll be able to pause, stop, restart and rewind it, all of which have their advantages, no doubt, but all of which will destroy the careful craft with which Bentley has made this film.
For those who watch it as intended — all at once, carefully — Train Dreams offers a rare kind of emotional intelligence too often missing in movies, which lead it to a final scene that feels perfect, aided by evocative narration from Will Patton. That last moment, in turn, leads to an end-credits song by the singular Nick Cave* that will leave you soaring, sobbing or, most likely, a little of both.
---
* Oh, God — it just hit me what the damnable autoplay feature in Netflix will do to these credits, and how Netflix will ruin one of the most sublime moments I've had in movies all year. Train Dreams deserves a fate far, far better than being yet another piece of "content" on the streaming service.
Viewed December 11, 2025 — Motion Picture & Television Fund
1400
