TIFF25: “Train Dreams” Finds Deep Purpose in Simplicity
This review was originally published on Film Obsessive.
For a long time, the Western has been a genre of film steeped in masculinity. In conquering a land that was new to White people, but known to the Indigenous people living there. Recent years have seen new entries into the genre that present a different kind of White masculinity, one that is guided by gentle kindness. Less interested in fundamentally altering the land to the needs of man, but to only take what one needs. Living more harmoniously than before. Clint Bentley’s gently moving Train Dreams had its world premiere earlier this year at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Its screening at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival marks its international premiere where it continues to captivate the hearts and minds of audiences.
Robert Grainier (The Boys in the Boat’s Joel Edgerton) makes his living as a laborer at the tail end of the 1800s. He takes hard, manual jobs in cutting down trees and building railroad tracks, but yearns to understand life on a deeper level. That possibility comes to him in the form of Gladys (Felicity Jones of The Brutalist), a confident woman who has a forward thinking mentality. She exists beyond the mindset of the time period, interested in being an equal with Robert, who wants the exact same thing. They build a modest home together along a river, raise a daughter, and watch the world change around them.
courtesy of TIFF
Train Dreams is based on the 2011 novella of the same name by Denis Johnson. Bentley adapted it with his collaborator Greg Kwedar with the same melancholic hope that coursed through their Oscar-nominated film, Sing Sing. Train Dreams captures the world as it is about to fundamentally turn. The repercussions of this era we still feel today. Robert was born in the late-1800s and lives to the 1960s. It’s almost unfathomable to consider the change Robert experiences firsthand and Train Dreams keeps us secluded from a lot of that change. For the majority of the film, we don’t venture far from Robert’s town in Idaho. We follow him to the various forest he cuts down to build railroad tracks that will connect parts of the country he will never get to see. We only see the impending future from afar to start. Robert rides on a train that runs parallel to a new road that has cars barreling in a way that puts the train to shame. It’s only toward the end of the film that Robert ventures into a modern city. By immersing the audience in the quiet, isolated existence of Robert, we are just as shocked as Robert when he stumbles across a television set showing a man in space. Without even realizing it, the world has left Robert behind and he is still struggling to understand his place in it.
courtesy of TIFF
There are a lot of surprising links to Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women in Train Dreams. Both films have a narrator that creates a folktale-like quality to them and they end in similar fashions. Mills and Bentley are both curious directors who focus on the stillness life has to offer and how that can illuminate a purpose of our time here. “Hold on to something,” Robert is told in the final scene of the movie. It’s something he doesn’t have to be told twice. This man does nothing but hold onto people, memories, emotions. He feels things so deeply and will not let go of anyone in his life who has brought meaning. Whether that be Gladys, their daughter, or the fellow men he met out on the job, Robert holds every single one of them as close as he can. As painful as it is to remember the loss associated with some of them, it’s far harder to allow himself to forget.
Train Dreams is a miraculous wonder. The kind of movie that forces you to stop and take stock of this planet. In the ways the trees blow in the wind, the way your loved one smiles, and the simple joy that comes from finding a family and a home. As much as Train Dreams puts the microscope to Robert, it uses his perspective to see the technological and social changes happening around him. He sees the way immigrants are mistreated and it haunts him that he failed to stand up for his friend who was on the receiving end of violence. Robert becomes a hatchet in a world of chainsaws and yearns for a world he understands again. Train Dreams is a mesmerizing work, both intimate and grand.
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