Sometimes it seems that life happens to us – that we just go along, minding our business, trying hard to do our best and then, wham — a bad thing happens or a good thing happens, without will on our part.
That’s the way it seems for Robert Grainier. Around 1894, when he is six years old, his parents die and he is sent on a train with a tag around his neck with the arrival city printed on it. He was never told how his parents died, and we don’t know anything about him until he joins a railroad crew in Idaho.
He’s a quiet guy who likes silence. He minds his own business. He is not driven by ambition – just survival.
Why this title?
Robert works in exclusively male-driven work. We meet him working on a railroad line crew, where he sees men gang up on his Asian work partner and throw him over the train trestle. It’s a ruthless murder in a male-driven world, and Robert is left shouting out, “What’s he done?”
Like the repetitive sound of a train’s engine and the repetitive route it travels, people who make an impression, like the Asian, in Robert’s life, keep recurring to him in dreams, visions, and sounds. Maybe they haunt him because his subconscious is wrestling with his moral responsibility in a rough world.
Also, as trains come and go, so does progress. The very train bridge Robert works on is replaced within 10 years by a cement one. Yet he is loyal to an old train on the old track, and that’s the road he chooses to travel. He does not adapt, though change and time march on.
The style
This is the fourth film Clint Bentley, who was raised on a Florida cattle ranch, and his filmmaking partner, Greg Kwedar, have created. The third, “Sing Sing” was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay in last year’s Oscars. Alternating directorial roles, this is Bentley’s second time directing, and his work is masterful. He directs his cast to play in a low-key, quiet, yet deeply moving way.
Joel Edgerton’s studied quietness as Robert Grainier, a loner, deeply impresses. Everything is so slight, so silent – yet a heavy silent pain is conveyed. Even William H. Macy’s character portrayal of the dynamiter, Arn Peeples, in the lumberman scenes is underplayed yet powerful. Robert asks him, “Do you think the bad things we do follow us in life?”
While Peeples is rather silent on the matter, when Robert meets Claire (wonderfully cast Kerry Condon), he gets a powerful answer. Claire works for the US Forest Service and lives in a fire lookout station. He confesses to her about his guilt at not being at his homestead when a forest fire ravages the area. She tells him that a “dead tree is as important as the living one” in that all of life, the living and dead, are interconnected.
Robert is so precious because he takes responsibility for what happens in his life. Even though he is not always the force behind the bad things, they still haunt him. He is not a hero, but an everyman. The film will impact you because deep inside, he is one of us.
Oh, such a delicately strong film. “Train Dreams” has been named as one of the top ten films of 2025 by Vanity Fair, the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures and the American Film Institute. For his performance, Edgerton has been nominated for a Golden Globe Award.
Credits
Director: Clint Bentley
Screenplay: Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar; Based on the novella “Train Dreams: by Denis Johnson
Producers: Marissa McMahon, Teddy Schwarzman, Will Janowitz, Ashley Schlaifer, and Michael Heimler
Cast: Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, Clifton Collins Jr., Kerry Condon and William H. Macy
Cinematography: Adolpho Veloso
Editor: Parker Laramie
Music: Bryce Dessner
Distributor: Netflix
Release Date: Nov. 7, 2025
Official Website: https://www.traindreamsfilm.com/
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