Train Dreams (United States, 2025)

Train Dreams is a lyrical film—a movie concerned more with emotional impact, nostalgia, and powerful imagery than rigid plotting. It is the kind of cinema where a state of reverie is not merely encouraged, but required. Although there is a narrative, the experience is elegiac in nature as director Clint Bentley's adaptation of the 2011 Denis Johnson novella attempts to recreate a lost world: the rugged, still somewhat untamed lands of Idaho during the early 20th century. The film captures a specific fissure in American history, where the ancient, superstitious wilderness was beginning to yield to the steam and steel of the industrial age.

The central figure in Train Dreams is Robert Grainer (Joel Edgerton), and the film serves as a fragmented chronicle of his adult life, mostly centered around the town of Bonners Ferry. Once an orphaned child who grew up in the area after arriving alone on the Great Northern Railway, the adult Robert takes jobs for logging companies and works on the railroad. One day, while attending church, he meets Gladys Olding (Felicity Jones); they fall in love and marry. Living in a log cabin that Robert builds, they have a daughter. Robert continues his seasonal logging work, which provides the income his family needs to survive, but he is distressed by how much of his daughter's life he is missing. Then, when the narrator (Will Patton) notes that Robert would remember these days as the happiest of his life, we know that bad things lie just over the suddenly smoke-clogged horizon.

Much of the film focuses on the quiet, tightly controlled performance of Joel Edgerton, whose low-key interpretation of Robert is key to the movie's success. There are moments of quiet joy and more overt sadness, but he emotes in a restrained fashion, eschewing melodrama. Robert is a man of few words, so the burden of storytelling falls on Edgerton’s physicality—the stoop of his shoulders and the weathering of his face conveying the passage of time more effectively than any dialogue could. Although Train Dreams is ultimately a tragedy, it finds time for moments of great humanity. Edgerton is the focal point, never overacting, always remaining under control.

The film features several memorable secondary characters. Felicity Jones, although only in a handful of scenes (Gladys is the home Robert returns to; he's often away), brings a sense of warmth and joy to her performance. William H. Macy, John Diehl, Kerry Condon, and Nathaniel Arcand play some of the people who drift into and out of Robert's life. Much like in reality, they don't stick around long—this is, after all, his story, not theirs. But, especially in the case of Macy's Arn, an explosives expert Robert spends time with in the forests, their impressions linger long after their portrayals are done.

Bentley's unhurried style—allowing his camera to linger as he attempts to recreate a bygone era—has led to comparisons to Terrence Malick. Although there are certainly similarities, Malick had a tendency to find vibrancy in the film's visual language, sometimes to the detriment of the human one. He also frequently had pacing problems, but Train Dreams runs as smoothly as a locomotive gliding along a track. Bentley has acknowledged Malick's influence but has also cited diverse inspirations such as Andrei Rublev, Princess Mononoke, and Jules et Jim.

Train Dreams is a travelogue into the past in the company of a salt-of-the-earth character worth taking the journey with. We smile with him as he finds love and weep when the unthinkable happens. The second half of the film is a meditation on solitude and how being alone doesn't always equate to being lonely.

Train Dreams (United States, 2025)