What makes a life worthy of examination on the big screen? It's a question I've found myself mulling over since watching Train Dreams, the new movie from Sing Sing duo Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar.
Because Train Dreams' central figure, Robert Grainer, is no one special. As portrayed by Joel Edgerton (Warrior, The Great Gatsby), Grainer is a logger whose peripatetic worklife has him felling trees across the Pacific Northwest as part of the railroad's cross-country expansion in the early 20th Century. One day, Grainer meets Gladys (Felicity Jones, Rogue One), and they start a family. The Grainers have a perfectly pleasant life together, until one day they don't, and Robert is left to live out the rest of his days in contemplative solitude, only occasionally crossing paths with similarly sorrowful individuals, like Kerry Condon's forest worker Claire.
There is a Major Event in Train Dreams but, perhaps tellingly, it happens off-camera, as Grainer arrives home via train from his latest months-long stint in the wilderness. A different film would have Grainer running headfirst into danger to save his nearest and dearest, but Train Dreams is a film, in part, about how change is often beyond our control, and that life continues on regardless.
"I remember reading the script and thinking, 'Oh, Clint is going to do something really special with Train Dreams,'" says Jones, speaking to GamesRadar+ during the London Film Festival in October 2025. Noting that much of the film was shot on location in the shadow of towering pine trees in Washington State, with natural light illuminating a custom-built cabin that the Grainers call home, it's a film that has a Malickian relationship with the natural world. "I live in a very urban area, so I think I was slightly fantasizing about that – what would it be like to be in that environment, exploring the positive and the negative impacts of the life removed? It can be, at times, very isolating."
For Condon (F1: The Movie, The Banshees of Inisherin), the opportunity to explore her own relationship with the natural world through Claire proved irresistible. "I am big into nature," Condon says. "I love movies where nature is this big character, and they talk about having a respect for nature. I think those are important things for people to remember. Then the script was so beautiful to read… I knew he was going to pull it off in a beautiful way."
Out of the ordinary
What Train Dreams identifies is that the ordinary life of a turn-of-the-century logger is just as extraordinary as a typical screen hero at the center of seismic change. There's nothing special about Grainer, but that's what makes him special. He is a man who finds himself left behind by the march of progress and haunted by his past for much of the movie. It is a melancholy depiction of what a person does when they have nothing left to live for. But Grainer never gives up on life, and the uplifting final act of Grainer's story is a soaring sendoff, and one of the most moving sequences you'll see on screen this year.
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An underutilized leading man, Edgerton does special work here. There is an emptiness and longing that the star conveys almost entirely through physicality, as Grainer is a man of few words at the best of times. Jones' Gladys represents something different for the film – the bright sun at its centre – but Grainer and Condon's Claire have a great deal in common. In fact, despite limited screen time, it's easy to imagine the camera wandering off and following Claire for a stretch and locating an equally rich story.
"There were a lot of similarities between me and Claire," says Condon, who rescues horses on a farm outside Seattle when she isn't acting in movies. "Her tomboyishness is quite similar to me. But her backstory is talked about in the voice-over, so that helped me understand where she was at and how to get to here."
Off the beaten track
A rare film with evocative, additive voice-over (the drawl of character actor Will Patton will be familiar if you've watched a western in the last 30 years), Train Dreams has a lyrical, meditative quality that won't be to everyone's taste. It would be somewhat generous to describe it as 'slow-paced', in fact. But succumb to its rhythms and Train Dreams is, well, a dream.
How the film will fare on streaming when it hits Netflix in a few weeks is another question – something tells me the second screen ecosystem won't be kind to a movie where a man frequently spends multiple minutes at a time staring out at the tree line in quiet reflection. But everyone involved knows they're a part of something exceptional.
"The reason that cinema is having such a great moment is that audiences are really enjoying distinctive viewpoints and quite a singular viewpoint, in some ways," says Jones, who most recently starred in another arthouse hit, The Brutalist. "This sounds really naff, but it's a palette, and you're one of the paints that they're using to put an idea into the world."
Robert Grainer may be no one special, but Train Dreams is quite the opposite.
Train Dreams is out now in theaters and streams on Netflix from November 21. For more, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series or our list of the best Netflix movies to watch right now.
