When I saw Train Dreams at the Sundance Film Festival all the way back in January, I wondered if it would still look like one of the best movies of the year as we got to the end of 2025. If not, I thought, this was going to be a pretty great year for movies. Well, this has been a pretty great year for movies, and it’s still one of the very best.
The film stars Joel Edgerton, who’s as good here as he’s ever been. He plays Robert Grainier, a man living in the early 20th century in Washington state, who we first see helping to build the railroad before he moves on to being a logger, taking down the vast forest with his hands and a saw. We’re told his story in voiceover by a narrator and it makes us feel as if we’re being told a fable—well, maybe not a fable, maybe a more universal story? Or, an American story? But it’s not the one we like to pretend exists, the one about bootstraps and such—it’s more a story of a smaller life, as Grainier works, loves, marries, suffers unspeakable loss, and simply tries to make his way in a world that is changing drastically around him. Much of the film makes us feel and recognize the passage of time and the enormous differences between one year and another, both within a single life, and all around it. A bridge Grainier builds gives way to a much more modern version decades later. A young man becomes old and sees through the eyes of the old men who were around him when he was young. Lives blink away. Lives continue on. And the men cut the forest, the forest that’s been there for thousands of years, and we know, from where we are in our current time, where this is all going and what all this change will mean. And throughout, Grainier lives, never quite feeling connected to his world, despite being in such an undeniably beautiful and rich place as the Washington forest. But, then, those trees will fight back, and he’s cutting them down, and maybe he can’t connect precisely because of this.
Director Clint Bentley isn’t shy about showing his influences, especially Terrence Malick and his artistic heirs, plus a little Kelly Reichardt and a lot of Andrew Dominik’s movie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. But if you’re going to be obvious about your influences it makes sense to choose the greats. Train Dreams is an exceptional work of art, and I have only one single bad thing to say about it: At one point a character refers to Kansas, saying, “That state is a collection of savage lunatics.” And of course I deeply resent this.
Train Dreams is on Netflix November 21st.
