NOW IN THEATERS! Director / co-writer Clint Bentley presents in Train Dreams a poignant character study of a man and his times. He is Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), living in the dynamic days of the early 20th century. The film creates a fictional biography of both the character and the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Grainier was born in the late 1800s. The fate of his parents is unknown, but he is orphaned and sent to live with an adoptive family in Fry, Idaho. When he comes of age, Grainier begins seasonal work as a sawyer employed by logging companies and railroads. He travels between Washington state and Idaho, returning home in winter to await the next logging season.
Grainier falls in love with and marries a woman named Gladys (Felicity Jones), builds a cabin by a river, and they have a child. His personality is intense and direct, focusing on family, home, and work, always aware of the sublime gifts and threats of nature all around him. He’s a working-class renaissance man. Grainier meets people along the way who become his companions and shape his view of the world. One of his logging crew friends is Arn Peeples (William H. Macy), a fearless old man and camp philosopher who believes in myths and specializes in clearing land with dynamite. Later in life, he meets a forest ranger named Claire Thompson (Kerry Condon) who moves to Idaho to help manage the forest and watch for fires from a tall tower.
TRAIN DREAMS – (L-R) Gladys Oakley (Felicity Jones) and Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton). Cr: Courtesy of Netflix
“…Grainier begins seasonal work as a sawyer employed by logging companies and railroads.”
Starting from a popular novella by Denis Johnson, Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar tell the story of an ordinary life in a hyper-aware way. Grainier sees his journey whole, surprised when happy, then weighted down by guilt and trauma. The film deviates from the novella on at least one key fact, to keep the focus on the theme of the interdependence of people and nature.
Elements of Train Dreams are anachronistic, glossing over the violence and the grinding weight of manifest destiny, the White people assumed gave them the divine right to the land. This point gets a nod, but it’s not enough. Grainier seems awfully clean, healthy, and emotionally balanced for a man at the turn of the century with his socioeconomic status. His sensitivity to the world around him is unusual. He lives in the time of Jack London and J.P. Morgan, when life was brutal, and struggling to survive took priority over considering the beauty of the forest. Grainier helps to clear-cut the Pacific Northwest and build the tracks for the loud, smoky Iron Horse to bring the next wave of the gritty industrial future to the West Coast.
"…a monumental achievement..."
