Train Dreams

A train goes in one direction, along a track. Dreams are higgledy-piggledy inventions of memory that can defy the laws of physics. In dreams, sometimes yourself is not even the main character. Life, suggests TRAIN DREAMS, is where going in one direction, following the arrow of time, is a dreamscape in which reasons – what’d they do? – the physics of logic, are absent.

Clint Bentley’s film of a novella by Dennis Johnson takes considerable liberties with details in the source material. I find this dubious, especially as these liberties do allow us to have a different attitude towards the main character, Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton). Where Johnson is compared to Hemingway, Bentley sees himself in the school of Terence Malick. I would agree that this is a very Malickian film, although one more clear-cut, more approachable than Malick’s later work like KNIGHT OF CUPS. It harkens back to the time of BADLANDS and DAYS OF HEAVEN.

The film is a biography of Grainier, from childhood until his death at the age of 80 in 1968. It is also an exercise in Americana. I would call it something of a MAGA art film, in its celebration of an ordinary man and lack of connection to the world of the coastal elites. Grainier spends his entire life in the Pacific Northwest, mostly Idaho. He lives life taking little interest in anything but what is in front of him. There is hardly a mention of the First World War and none at all of the Second. This is a very white world. We see a couple of Chinese people and one African-American man. Notwithstanding occasional references to years and seasons, it is very difficult to follow the chronology here. There are flashbacks or dreams that contribute to the confusion. This disorder seems intended to underline a philosophical point that in a person’s life time is neither flat circle nor arrow, but a jumble of memories and apprehensions.

Seemingly an incurious man, living a life without electricity or books, Grainier exemplifies what’s wrong with a country that encourages by religion and education his depressingly narrow focus on today and his personal circumstances. As the film is taken up with Grainier’s quest for meaning in his life, I can’t help but believe that he could have solved his curse by reading more novels and maybe a bit of poetry. Even a few folk songs or hymns might help, Robert.

There’s a fascinating visual motif in the film, established early on – a contrast between height and depth. Grainier’s career as a young man is as a logger. We see a tree fall, from the perspective of looking up, and then riding it as it crashes to the forest floor. There is a danger from things dropping on the loggers from a height. Fu Sheng (Alfred Hsing) goes from top to bottom. The first glimmer of Grainier’s understanding comes from a conversation with the Forest Service lookout Claire Thompson (Kerry Condon) atop her tower. The aforementioned John Glenn trip to the greatest of heights coincides with an aeroplane ride that finally brings Grainier’s quest for peace to an end.

To get there, Grainier mopes around for eight decades, perplexed mainly by the apparent randomness of death and the inhumanity of pitiless nature and nature of pitiless human beings. Our sentiments are relentlessly battered by a soundtrack determined to wrench tears from our eyes, successfully in my case. Because all of us have personal tragedies that we have suffered, often involving loss, the film has a universal appeal. Grainier’s life ought to warn us to find consolations in the Arts, an option that our Tech Overlords seem set on removing. I fear that as a MAGA art film it will be interpreted rather as a celebration of an ordinary American, who fought the good fight and never took a dime of welfare. But I come back to Bentley’s deft use of his heights motif. This metaphor obviously supports my view that we need to focus on the higher things in order to understand it all.

© 2026 Paul Brewer