While watching Clift Bentley’s “Train Dreams” (2025), I found myself wondering what the people who work alongside the protagonist, Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), think of him. A hard worker, good with his hands, Robert keeps to himself and doesn’t start trouble. If you can imagine turn-of-the-century loggers and railroad workers describing someone as “a good listener,” he would fit the bill. The less charitable might describe him as dull, aloof, “like talking to a log.”
None of them see what we, the viewers, see: Robert’s quiet sensitivity, his deep love for his family, his spiritual affinity for the natural world. But isn’t that always the case? Every person we encounter contains multitudes; but except for a precious few, we hardly ever get to scratch the surface. We make do with what they show us, mixed with our own perspectives and prejudices. It’s so easy to see the immediate that we forget to look for the profound.
“Train Dreams” unites the common and the cosmic. Based on a novella by Denis Johnson and adapted by Bentley and Greg Kwedar, the film immerses us in the ordinary life of Robert Grainier in order to gesture at the extraordinary: the immensity of time, the fleetness of life and those rare moments where the earthly and the eternal intersect.
The film, which is nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards, covers Robert’s entire 80 years of life, which he spends almost entirely in northern Idaho. Born in the latter years of the 19th century, he grows up in a world still largely untouched by industry. Filmed in Washington State, Bentley and the cinematographer Adolpho Veloso fill the movie with Terrence Malick-inspired footage of dense green woods, vast fields and golden-hour light glowing on the river. But Robert also grows up in a time of great change, as railroad companies hack their way through all of that greenery in their quest to bring commerce to every corner of the continent.
Robert marries Gladys (Felicity Jones). They build a cabin by a river and have a daughter, Kate. He takes seasonal work, mostly logging. It’s a dangerous, sometimes brutal, existence: He sees other loggers killed by a falling tree, and a friend (an excellent William H. Macy) is felled by a falling branch. Early in the film, he witnesses railroad workers toss a Chinese laborer off of a bridge, and he only vaguely tries to intervene; the incident haunts him.
When he loses his wife and daughter to a wildfire, Robert sinks into despair. He moves on with help from his friend Ignatius Jack (Nathaniel Arcand)—the name is a subtle reference to the Jesuits’ missionary work with the Kootenai people—and a widowed Forest Services worker named Claire (Kerry Condon). He remains much the same through his joys and hardships: quiet, unassuming, hardworking. But the world continues to change around him. New technology replaces flesh-and-blood workers; new trains and bridges replace the ones that he and the others sweated and bled over. He takes a ride in a biplane and, towards the end of his life, watches John Glenn reach orbit.
It may seem that not much happens and, technically, not much does. When Robert dies in 1968, the omniscient narrator (Will Patton) tells us, “his life ended as quietly as it had begun.” He leaves behind no heirs, no legacy, no larger mark on the world except for the small, anonymous part he played in the ceaseless story of progress. But this is precisely the point: Robert Grainier’s life, quiet as it is, has as much depth and meaning as those that end up in the history books. Like each of us, he possesses a unique and inherent dignity simply by virtue of his existence. And like each of us, he is limited, as is all human endeavor. Robert watches men die doing jobs that will be obsolete in less than a generation. Eventually, all of our memories vanish, all of our work is erased or redone, all of our stories end.
That thought might inspire a sense of futility, but “Train Dreams” instead uses it to remind us how, as Pope Francis wrote in “Laudato Si’,” “everything is interconnected.” What separates a human being from a tree or an animal isn’t that we can be masters of the world; it’s that we have the ability to recognize our own finitude and choose what to do with it. Some spend their time in defiance, amassing wealth as if the end will never come, or seeking to carve out a sort of immortality on earth. Others, like Robert, recognize how precious connection is and the beauty of simple things. His “quiet” life is not wasted. In truth, there is something admirable—maybe holy—about the way he walks softly through life, with no greater ambitions than to love and provide for his family.
If the film occasionally errs on the side of making Robert too passive, that is a side effect of it being more a parable than a character study. In Robert (and in Edgerton’s restrained, soulful performance) we are meant to see our own reflection. Perhaps we will also leave this life quietly, with little trace that we were here except in the memories of those who knew us. We are small, we are limited, but—“Train Dreams” reminds us—we are also so much more.
“Train Dreams” is streaming on Netflix.
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