The Best Picture nominee Train Dreams features a rarity in Western fiction: a protagonist with little agency and even less interior life. Where most stories, especially American stories about men, the heroes are strivers and individualists—the untamable Huckleberry Finn, the self-made Jay Gatsby, the indomitable Charles Foster Kane—Robert Grainier of Train Dreams simply seems to float on the periphery of his life in late 19th century and early 20th century Idaho. As played by Joel Edgerton, Grainier is a man most comfortable when working felling trees, and seems to do his best to push away thoughts rather than exploring them.
One particular memory that Grainier wants to avoid comes from a moment from his boyhood, when he witnessed the Chinese citizens in his town forcefully removed. The narrator, voiced by Will Patton and reading directly from the Denis Johnson novella the film adapts, tells us that the violence of the moment confused the young Grainier. Yet, as much as he tries to forget about that and other unpleasant moments of his life, Grainier cannot completely avoid them—nor, crucially, can we viewers. This combination of lyrical narration and obstinate protagonist allows director Clint Bentley to make Train Dreams into a beautiful, heartbreaking film about the sins that America cannot forget, no matter how much it tries.
Blazing a Solemn Path
Co-written by Bentley and Greg Kwedar, Train Dreams follows 80 years in the life of the logger Grainier. With its lush nature photography, meditative pace, and heavy use of voiceover, Train Dreams has drawn comparisons to Terrence Malick films such as Days of Heaven. But Bentley and cinematographer Adolpho Veloso shot the film in Academy ratio, underscoring a more limited scope than most of Malick’s work, which can sometimes span from the dawn of creation to the 1960s.
Moreover, Grainier is hardly as soulful as even the murderers of Malick’s debut Badlands. He wants only to work and to spend his time with his wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) and their infant daughter Kate. Even the former becomes less interesting after the birth of Kate, as he and Gladys make plans to build a sawmill, which would allow him to spend less time felling trees with teams of laborers and more time with his family. However, when he returns from one final lumbering job to find his home destroyed and Gladys and Kate missing, Grainier returns to logging. He only stops when younger men and heightened technology render him obsolete, forcing him to work as a carriage driver for a time and then to finally retire and spend his days in his secluded cabin.
Despite the simplicity of its main character, Train Dreams feels rich. Some of that depth comes from the narration, with Patton’s warm, inviting voice bringing out the best in Johnson’s prose. Some comes from the beauty of the cinematography, which fills the boxy frame with the lushness of nature, and some comes from the score by Bryce Dessner of The National, all warm crescendos and tinkling harpsichord and tentative violins.
Train Dreams‘s ability to create depth beyond the limitations of its main character reveals a theme running throughout the film, one that uses Grainier’s work aiding the Westward expansion of the United States and his proximity to racial violence to draw attention to America’s national sins.
Guilt By Association
The expulsion of Chinese workers that Grainier witnessed as a child has an echo later in adulthood, in a scene that occurs mere minutes from the first. While Grainier works on a portion of the Spokane International Railway, the narrator tells us that he took comfort in the easy coalition of the various men who came together there. To illustrate the point, the camera captures Grainier and a Chinese worker called Fu Sheng (Alfred Hsing) sawing in perfect rhythm, each on either side of the tool.
Their work comes to an end when a group of men grabs Fu, drag him up to the bridge, and hurl him off the edge. As soon as the men take Fu, Grainier begins asking “What’s he done?” and he even grabs Fu’s legs, potentially to free him or potentially to help with the execution. But after Fu kicks him away, Grainier simply watches, neither supporting nor stopping the atrocity.
In the very next scene, the overseer who led the lynching gives a pep talk to the workers. “You boys have shown this old river valley who’s boss,” he bellows. “You have helped save Spokane International. Eleven miles it used to take to get around this gorge. And you opened up a new part of the country.” Some men scoff at the boss’s declaration, others cheer along. Grainier simply stares.
Grainier may not be able to make sense of the combination he just experienced, but we viewers can. We understand that we saw American expansion in miniature, both the destruction of natural spaces for the sake of industry and the elimination of a non-white person whose labor had been deemed no longer worthwhile.
Even if we read Grainier as a willing participant in the murder of Fu, he does not present himself as a virulent racist. Even though he spends much of his life cutting down trees for the sake of the railroad, he isn’t a committed capitalist. Grainier is just a man trying to exist.
Yet the Grainier’s proximity to the events indicts him in the nation’s larger sins. He may not have caused racism or rampant industrialization, but he’s certainly haunted by them, as demonstrated by the visions of burning trees and of Fu’s ghost that visit him throughout the film.
Quiet Condemnation
As in their previous collaboration, the excellent 2023 drama Sing Sing, Bentley and Kwedar are clear, but not strident, in their politics. They’re more interested in the human drama of a person caught in an unjust system than they are having those people declare their anger against systemic wrongs.
That approach allows Train Dreams to be a beautiful, quiet movie. The combination of natural imagery, subtle music, and Johnson’s prose allows the audience to invest in the emotional depth of the story, and even lets them leave the film thinking they’ve just watched a simple life, well lived, forgetting all of the themes after a good cry.
But anyone who pays closer attention to Grainier’s dreams and the thoughts he tries to hard to avoid will see something different. There, they’ll find a tragedy that goes far beyond the unremarkable life of one man, a tragedy at the roots of the American experiment.
Train Dreams is now streaming on Netflix.
