Train Dreams (2025)
Written by Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar
Directed by Clint Bentley
So many people speak about finding meaning in life. Something I’ve come to understand is that humans are awakening apes. We are clever creatures, cobbling together technology that can do amazing things, but we remain deeply blind when it comes to understanding our interior lives and forming meaningful connections with others. So much of our existence consists of things that simply happen, with little to no reason. We’re born to random people who may or may not be fit to raise us. We’re randomly born into an economic class that profoundly shapes the direction of our lives. Nature treats us coldly; a tornado can appear without warning and decimate everything you’ve built. Perhaps your economic class shields you from that devastation to some degree.
Train Dreams follows the quiet, punishing life of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), a logger and railroad laborer in the early 20th-century American West, whose existence unfolds largely on the margins of history. Orphaned at a young age and raised by relatives, Robert drifts into brutal but honest work building railroads and working logging camps, finding brief moments of tenderness in his marriage to Gladys (Felicity Jones) and their young daughter. When a catastrophic forest fire shatters that fragile domestic life, Robert is left spiritually unmoored, wandering through a rapidly modernizing world that no longer has a place for him. The film traces decades of his solitude, labor, and endurance as the frontier disappears around him, becoming a meditation on memory and the unnoticed lives that quietly built the modern world.
I went into this film with moderate expectations, not expecting much from it. What I found was less a narrative film than a piece of poetry. Plot is largely unimportant; the viewer is asked instead to feel the passing of time, the ache of loss, and the confusion caused by senseless actions and dramatic changes in the world. Out of this, the film does not callous over or drift toward reactionary sentiment. Rather, it focuses on the tenderness that can arise as the world rushes past. Grainier exists on the fringes of society, rooted in the isolation of being an orphan. He becomes a railroad worker who witnesses the random murder of a fellow laborer—a Chinese man—by a pair of thugs. The face of the deceased haunts Robert for the rest of his life, though even he seems unsure why. He feels something profound about this man but is unable to articulate it.
Grainier’s life is defined by brief but meaningful connections. He marries and has a child, yet spends so much time away in logging camps that he struggles to truly know his wife and daughter. This makes the moments they do share feel impossibly precious and fleeting. He meets many men through his work, including an old-timer played beautifully by William H. Macy. Through these older workers, Grainier seems to glimpse possible future versions of himself. There is a Native shopkeeper who keeps him company during one of his darkest hours, and a forest ranger he befriends for a time, played by Kerry Condon. No one is permanent, but all of them leave lasting impressions.
Clint Bentley demonstrates a deft hand both behind the camera and in the editing room, constructing a meditation on how closely intertwined life and death truly are, and how fragile human existence ultimately is. The railroad and the forest recur as central images. The emphasis is on connection—not only to people, but to nature and the cosmos, which are essential parts of being human. We exist within a vast cosmic system that we understand only in fragments. We grasp some of the mechanisms, but the whole remains elusive. It becomes confounding to consider the arrogance with which so many people move through the world, hardening themselves because they cannot bear vulnerability. None of us truly knows why we are here, what we are meant to do, or what happens when our lives end. Yet operating from constant anxiety, we fail to cherish the connections we make along the way.
While watching this film, I was reminded of author Octavia E. Butler’s idea of Change as God. Butler rejects a static, comforting divinity in favor of a harsher truth: change is the only constant, and survival depends on shaping it rather than denying it. God is not a benevolent overseer but the force of transformation itself; indifferent, inevitable, and morally neutral. This philosophy resonates powerfully with Train Dreams, which portrays change not as progress but as erosion: of landscapes, communities, and inner lives. Robert Grainier experiences the mechanization of the American West, industrial expansion, and environmental devastation as a series of losses he cannot control or meaningfully influence.
Grainier never learns to shape change; he endures it in silence, absorbing its blows. Where Butler frames change as something that demands intention and adaptability, Train Dreams offers a quieter, more tragic counterpoint: change as something that simply happens to you, leaving behind a life defined less by agency than by what has vanished. Together, they form a bleak but illuminating dialogue. One insists that meaning must be constructed in motion, while the other mourns what happens when motion outruns understanding. I see these as two points on the path of human evolution. Grainier’s perspective reflects where we often are now; confused by what happens to us, while Butler imagines what we need to become, what carries us along the flowing river of evolution toward a higher level of awareness.
Robert Grainier’s life is not one meant to be grieved. He lived fully and formed many meaningful connections. He suffered loss, as we all do. We connect through those losses, much as the general store owner does by sitting with Grainier and watching over him. Grainier’s understanding of existence is fleeting, and even in the film’s beautiful epilogue, the narrator, voiced by the remarkable Will Patton, tells us that for one brief moment, Grainier feels connected to everything. But the moment does not last; it cannot. There is meaning in that impermanence. Because it dissolves as quickly as it appears, memory and emotion become essential tools for understanding. Train Dreams stands as the antithesis of most contemporary cinema: a profoundly human story, told with patience, compassion, and extraordinary care.
PopCult Reviews 