By: Alex Tilton
Sometimes a simple story is best. Train Dreams demonstrates this by creating what might be the most beautifully atmospheric movie experience you’re going to have. It’s better than anything I’ve seen since All Quiet on the Western Front. Some spoilers ahead, but in this case, that really might not matter at all. My verdict up front is that you need to watch this movie as soon as possible.
Train Dreams tells the story of the life and times of Robert Grainer, a logger living in the woods near Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho. He’s shipped out to Idaho as a child, orphaned with no knowledge of his parents. He drops out of school after a while because it simply doesn’t interest him, and he becomes a logger. The work is brutal, and he witnesses a murder that haunts him for the rest of his life. He eventually meets a woman names Gladys, marries her, and starts a life with her in a quiet cabin by a creek and they have a baby girl.
Every year Robert goes away for the logging season to support his family. The long absences and brutal job take their toll, so Robert and Gladys make plans to start farming their acre of land and build a small sawmill on it. But before this can happen, Robert needs to work another year as a logger to save up money. Upon his return he finds a forest fire in progress. His home is reduced to ashes and there is no trace of his family.
He spends a long time searching for them and waiting to see if they come back, only to finally admit to himself that they are almost certainly dead and he will not see them again. He briefly returns to logging, only to realize that he’s grown too old to keep up with such a physically demanding job and starts a small freight and transportation business.
Along the way he interacts with various other loggers, and townsfolk, and eventually becomes a forest department fire spotter living in a remote observation tower. He grows older and one night he encounters a feral young woman he thinks could be his daughter, who may have grown up on her own in the woods after surviving the fire. He cares for her for one night, but awakens to find her gone, and eventually admits to himself that he cannot be sure if it was real or if he imagined it. He lives out his remaining days in his cabin, finally achieving a sense of peace and connectedness with the world he’s been living in for 80 years before dying peacefully at home.
And that’s it. That’s the entire story. The life of a very simple, honest, hardworking man in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. But even if you know everything that happens ahead of time this movie will still hit you like an emotional sledgehammer.
There is no pandering. There is no cynicism. There are no tangents. There is no ‘quest’ to be completed or any villains to be vanquished. This is just a man living his life and hoping to find some meaning in it all. The acting is so good that you don’t need any of those things. The atmosphere and the journey are so immersive, authentic and painfully honest that imposing a typical story structure on it would’ve been a mortal insult.
But the director understood this and leaned hard into the spirit of the novella by Denis Johnson. Lead actor Joel Edgerton demonstrates that he is a master of his craft and bears the full load of the story with a quiet dignity and emotional range that will stick with you for a long time after the viewing. If you haven’t seen Train Dreams yet, do so at your earliest opportunity. This film is justifiably filed under ‘movies you need to watch’. It left me feeling emotionally worn out, but strangely content and peaceful. It is an indisputably powerful piece of art that gives me hope for the future of filmmaking.
