Train Dreams (2025)

A Life in Timber and Time - Train Dreams review by griggs

There’s a gentleness here that feels like one hard stare might blow it away. Train Dreams traces eighty years in the life of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), tucked away in the forests and rail towns of Idaho while the twentieth century rumbles past in the distance. Big history stays mostly off-screen; what we get are tiny choices, sudden losses, and the odd, stubborn flashes of grace that survive them.

Clint Bentley, co-writing again with Greg Kwedar after Sing Sing, has the same humane, unshowy grip: scenes are allowed to breathe, silences do as much work as dialogue, and Denis Johnson’s novella is honoured without being embalmed. Felicity Jones, Kerry Condon and Clifton Collins Jr. all add texture around Edgerton’s quietly staggering lead turn.

Adolpho Veloso’s cinematography is ravishing – natural light, smoke and shadow doing half the acting – and I genuinely regret not catching this in a cinema; those skies and sounds deserve a big screen. It’s unhurried and very quiet, and if you’re not on its wavelength you might say “nothing happens”. If you are, it’s quietly restorative. A small, luminous film, and one of the year’s standouts for me.

A Beautiful, Majestic Film - Train Dreams review by GI

A beautiful, moving and unexpectedly graceful film following the life of a hardworking and gentle man working on building the railroad bridges and logging in early twentieth century America. Joel Edgerton is superb as the quiet and introverted Robert, an orphan who is used to be lonely and working as a semi-hobo in the wilderness with men with strange tales of their dangerous lives, which he absorbs along with the magic of the nature with which he spends his time. When he meets Gladys (Felicity Jones) he embraces their love with a full intensity and yearns for her and their baby daughter when he has to spend months away in the forests. His journey is the heart of the narrative as this is a story of nature, landscape and connections. Robert has to face loss, grief and forlorn hope during his life and Edgerton really nails the guilts and turmoils of this simple man. He dreams of moments of the past where trauma has deeply affected him and also of hopes for the future as he journeys to and from his work to get home to his family. It's a very deeply affecting film and worthy of its awards and accolades. Really quite beautiful.