‘Train Dreams’ review: No return ticket needed

Train Dreams is a stunning, soulful portrait of love, loss, and change.

Train Dreams sits in the bones, the kind of film that drifts in like a ghost and haunts every part of you. Clint Bentley, fresh off his quietly profound Jockey, crafts a somber, sweeping odyssey about love, loss, and the indifferent churn of history. If Terrence Malick and Andrew Haigh ever joined forces to tell a story about the American West, it might look something like this. Graceful yet unflinching, full of aching silences and loud glances.

Adapted from Denis Johnson’s novella, follows Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), a day laborer who spends his life building America’s railroads while struggling to hold onto his fleeting sense of home. History is forging itself beneath his feet, but will it ever have a place for men like him? Or will he simply sink in the current of progress, forgotten like a name carved into a tree?

Bentley’s vision is clear from the first frame: Train Dreams isn’t about grand historical figures or defining moments. It’s about the people who toiled in the background, the ones who built the roads and bridges but never got their names etched into them. Edgerton’s performance is a masterclass in restraint, his face weathered and sunburnt, his crooked posture that of a man shaped by life-long toil and the friends he made and lost along the way. 

Train Dreams captures the minutia of grief.

When he meets Gladys (Felicity Jones), the film reveals its tender core. She’s his anchor, his reason to dream beyond the weight of hammer and steel. Their romance unfolds like rain, first a drizzle, then a shower, then a storm that washes both of them over. She moves through their home like sunlight through trees, finding beauty in the life they build together, no matter how fragile it may be.

And then, as life often does, it takes. The losses come suddenly, mercilessly, and Bentley doesn’t soften the blows. A fire. An empty home. A man left to sift through the ashes of his own history. Train Dreams captures grief not as a singular event but as a slow, creeping transformation. One that turns a man into a ghost of his former self.

The cinematography frames the Idaho panhandle with a painter’s eye, each shot soaking in the vastness of a land that endures no matter how many men try to claim it. Nature is both antagonist and supporting character to Grainier himself, a silent witness to his triumphs and tragedies, yet his existence still a flicker against the immensity of time.

The details that make up a life.

Kerry Condon and William H. Macy make brief but memorable appearances, their characters orbiting around Grainier’s life like echoes of a world moving on without him. Bentley’s script, co-written with Greg Kwedar, is lean yet poetic, knowing exactly when to let silence speak. Conversations are spare, words are chosen carefully, and yet every sentence lands like a hammer strike. This is a film that understands how people talk when they’ve spent their whole lives working. There’s no flourish, no excess, just the truth, stripped bare.

What makes Train Dreams so affecting is how it embraces the inevitability of change without losing sight of the small moments that make life worth living. A shared meal. A sunset. The quiet companionship of another soul.

As the film moves toward its melancholic yet strangely comforting conclusion, one can’t help but wonder: How will the world remember us? By the structures we help build, or by the love we leave behind? Bentley leaves us to ponder this on our own, and good on him for it. Train Dreams isn’t about legacy, really, it’s about the life lived in between. And on those tracks, however momentary or mundane, there is something beautiful to stumble upon.

Train Dreams is out now in limited theaters and premieres on Netflix November 21.Watch the trailer here.

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Images courtesy of Netflix.