Train dreams

Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, adapted from Denis Johnson’s novella, is a film that lingers like smoke in the lungs—fleeting, delicate, yet impossible to shake. It is not simply a story about one man, Robert Grainier, played with aching restraint by Joel Edgerton, but about the weight of time itself—how it stretches, collapses, and ultimately erodes both lives and landscapes. With Greg Kwedar co-writing the screenplay, the same partnership that delivered Sing Sing, the film is a continuation of their exploration of masculinity, grief, and the invisible laborers who built America yet remain forgotten in its history books.

The narrative follows Robert Grainier, an orphan who never knew his parents, raised in Idaho with little more than his body to offer a rapidly industrializing nation. He becomes a logger and rail worker at the turn of the twentieth century, part of the crews that carve train lines through vast forests. Early in his working life, he witnesses a brutal act—the racist murder of a Chinese laborer by fellow workers, an atrocity that he fails to prevent. That moment stains him, lingering like a curse and shadowing the decades that follow. Even when Robert finds love with Gladys, played with warmth and subtle steel by Felicity Jones, and builds a modest cabin where they raise their daughter Kate (Zoe Rose Short), tragedy and separation haunt the edges of their lives. He spends months at a time away, logging in treacherous conditions where death is a daily possibility, returning home to find his child older, his family life slipping through his fingers. When loss finally comes to claim him fully, he is left to navigate a void that seems endless.

Much has been said about the Malickian quality of the film, and indeed, Adolpho Veloso’s cinematography recalls Days of Heaven in its luminous naturalism, framing forests and rivers with the reverence of a prayer. The images are painterly—timber crashing in slow collapse, dust rising like divine particles, light scattering through branches—and yet they never feel ornamental. They root us in Robert’s physical world, the very ground that sustains him even as it resists him. Bryce Dessner’s score, at once mournful and transcendent, threads through these images like a heartbeat, capturing both the enormity of nature and the fragility of human life. It is paired with narration by Will Patton, whose gravelly, reflective tone turns Robert’s life into something mythic, a tale passed down by campfire light. Rarely does voiceover add as much texture as it does here—it transforms the film into something between memory and elegy.

The performances carry this delicate construction. Joel Edgerton delivers one of the finest turns of his career, inhabiting Robert with quiet dignity, a man more accustomed to enduring than speaking. His face becomes a canvas for decades of unspoken emotion—love, regret, guilt—his silences often louder than dialogue. Felicity Jones brings not just grace but agency to Gladys, ensuring she is never a background figure but an equal partner in their fragile domestic world. Their scenes together are tender and deeply lived-in, particularly the moments when they share chores simply to remain close. Around them, William H. Macy steals his scenes as Arn Peeples, a garrulous explosives expert whose philosophical ramblings about trees and karma give the film some of its sharpest insights. His words echo long after, as if he too is a ghost haunting Robert’s memory. Kerry Condon appears later in the story as a forestry worker who offers Robert connection when he is nearly consumed by grief, a presence that feels both grounding and bittersweet.

Thematically, Train Dreams is as much about America as it is about Robert. Progress is shown not as triumph but as violence: forests leveled, immigrant workers abused, lives discarded in the name of industry. The trains that Robert helps build become metaphors for both advancement and destruction—unstoppable, mechanical forces cutting through the wilderness, reshaping landscapes and erasing ways of life. The film is unsparing in showing how capitalism and industrialization grind down the very men who power them, and how grief accumulates in tandem with progress. Yet within this bleakness, Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar insist on glimpses of beauty: a child’s laughter, the warmth of a wife’s touch, the companionship of a stray dog. These fragments, though small, are what give life meaning, even when everything else is destined to fall away.

One of the most unforgettable aspects of the film is its ability to capture the sensation of time passing. Years slip by in a cut, a season disappears in an exhale, and before long Robert is aged, his hands weathered, his back bent, his world transformed by machines and technology that render his labor obsolete. Yet Train Dreams never treats him as passive. He is battered but not erased, a man who carries on even when it seems unbearable. There is something profoundly moving about watching him continue, haunted yet enduring, as the twentieth century surges past him.

The film premiered in the Premieres section of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where it was quickly acquired by Netflix for a staggering $16 million—a sign of confidence not only in its awards potential but also in its ability to resonate with audiences willing to embrace its quiet, elegiac rhythms. It is true that Train Dreams belongs to the realm of slow cinema, and it will not be for every viewer. But for those willing to surrender to its pace, the reward is immense. It offers not only a portrait of a single man but also an elegy for a way of life—an acknowledgment of the anonymous laborers who shaped the country, whose names were never carved into monuments, but who nonetheless lived, loved, and grieved with a fullness equal to anyone remembered by history.

Ultimately, Train Dreams is less about narrative than about experience—about breathing in the air of the Northwest, feeling the weight of an axe in hand, and witnessing the unrelenting passage of time. Clint Bentley, with Greg Kwedar, has crafted a film that is both intimate and expansive, sorrowful yet affirming. In Robert Grainier’s life, ordinary and unremarkable to outsiders, lies the essence of what it means to be human: to build, to lose, to endure, and to remember. Long after the credits roll, the echo of trains and falling trees remains, a reminder that even the smallest lives carry within them the vastness of history.

Train dreams
Directed by Clint Bentley
Written by Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar
Based on Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
Produced by Marissa McMahon, Teddy Schwarzman, Will Janowitz, Ashley Schlaifer, Michael Heimler
Starring  Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, Clifton Collins Jr., Kerry Condon, William H. Macy
Cinematography : Adolpho Veloso
Edited by Parker Laramie
Music by Bryce Dessner
Production companies : Black Bear Pictures, Kamala Films
Distributed by Netflix
Release dates : January 26, 2025 (Sundance), November 7, 2025 (United States), November 21, 2025 (Netflix)
Running time : 102 minutes

Seen on September 11 2025 at the Deauville International Center

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