Train Dreams

Cinema At Its Most Sacred 

There’s a gigantic difference between laying the moments of an entire life (No matter how significant the moment) and a whole life itself. Cinema is a beautiful translator of the lives that are overlooked and taken for granted. Yet, so many films are often so fixated on the significance of certain moments that the film as a whole doesn’t quite land as effectively as it was intended. Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, adapted so eloquently from Denis Johnson’s novel of the same name, lays bare the silent divine majesty of an entire life, and EVERY single shot, frame, and sound only ever evaporates into more heart-rendering beauty. 

Infrastructure is among the world’s greatest necessities. Society has survived without them for so long, and most countries in the world either have declining infrastructures or are impoverished without them completely. But they have to come from somewhere. Someone had to bring them to fruition. Train Dreams follows Joel Edgerton’s Robert Grainier, a quiet railroad worker whose work ethic never changes over the course of his entire life as he experiences loneliness, love, happiness, loss, grief, fear, and exhilaration. 

Train Dreams is so magnificently shot that it could easily have been a short film, but I’m glad a story this tender was made into a full feature. I know Edgerton’s casting is greatly responsible for this. He is so stoic and raw and an overall beautiful example of how masculinity doesn’t have to be only one thing. Grainier is a man who requires very little, partly by how he's survived on his own his whole life, but mostly it’s just his nature. 

Felicity Jones is powerful and majestic as his wife, Gladys, utilizing the same observational intelligence she used alongside Adrien Brody in The Brutalist. She and Joel both embody the resourcefulness and resilience of a true partnership in which purity is based on respect, adoration, and mutual understanding. 

Kerry Condon is wise and really stands out as a forest ranger Grainier encounters later towards the end of his life. “In the forest, every least thing’s important,” she says as she and Grainier look out over the horizon from her office. “It’s all threaded together so you can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins.” 

That line sums up Train Dreams in a nutshell. Perhaps we’re all trees at heart. The way the camera stays on the trees even as they’re being cut down and sawed apart. The sound they make. The ash after a devastating forest fire. The completely calm flat waters of the lake. All taken in by Edgerton’s eyes of silently screaming humanity. 

Train Dreams is the perfect film to end 2025 with. It’s been an awful year for so many, just as many of us anticipated it would be. I have a strong feeling that next year will be the year that shakes the world. We’ll be needing not just great cinema but audiences who step up and support them. I feel very confident that cinema doors will be the shelter we come to when we least expect it. Train Dreams is cinema at its most sacred. It’s devastating but not unbearable. It’s tranquil but not relaxing. It’s loving but not sappy. It doesn’t do one thing right. It does everything right. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Edgerton’s Best Actor Oscar nomination in January. 

Train dreams. (2025, December 21). Hi Pointe Theatre. https://s3.amazonaws.com/nightjarprod/content/uploads/sites/349/2025/11/20103725/l3zS4YnpOi4usyEXGJMtxSqDDyb1.jpg