Film Review: Train Dreams 火車大夢 (2025) - USA
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 8/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
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The Last Echo in the Timber: Clint Bentley's "Train Dreams" Whispers a Requiem for America - Director Clint Bentley's "Train Dreams," materializing on Netflix like a spectral transmission from a vanished world, defies the clamor of modern cinema. This adaptation of Denis Johnson's novella isn't a story told so much as a landscape felt – a haunting, minimalist epic etched in the rain, smoke, and profound silence of the dying American frontier. It earns its marks not through narrative pyrotechnics, but through the patient, aching accumulation of a life lived in the shadow of relentless progress, culminating in an ending of devastating, poetic clarity.
Joel Edgerton, delivering career-best work as Robert Grainier, is the film's bedrock. He doesn't speak a life; he embodies it in the stoop of his shoulders, the grit in his weathered gaze, the slow, deliberate movements of a man shaped by backbreaking labor and a grief as vast as the wilderness itself. His Oscar snub is a baffling oversight; this is acting of monumental physical and emotional restraint.
Adolpho Veloso’s cinematography is the film’s soul. The Pacific Northwest isn't scenery; it’s a living, breathing, often terrifying entity. Veloso contrasts the primal fury of a forest fire with the cold, invading steel of the railroad, crafting a visual elegy for the wild. Bentley directs with profound patience, making solitude palpable and every intrusion – human, mechanical, or spectral – feel like a violation.
The film’s power crescendos in its final act, a poignant meditation on time’s passage and the inexorable collision between wilderness and modernity. The arrival of the "Wolf Girl" is a masterstroke of ambiguous power. This feral, injured creature appears at Grainier’s cabin in his twilight years. He clings to the desperate belief she is his daughter Kate, miraculously survived the fire and raised by wolves. He tends her broken leg with a tenderness withheld for decades. Whether she is Kate, a lost indigenous child, or a grief-born hallucination remains hauntingly unresolved. The miracle lies in the act itself: for one night, Grainier experiences the fatherhood stolen from him. It’s not factual closure, but a profound, emotional catharsis, finally tending the wound that defined his existence.
Then, the film delivers a gut-punch of modernity: a jarring leap to the 1960s. An elderly, bewildered Grainier stands in Spokane, staring through a shop window. Inside, a color television broadcasts John Glenn orbiting the Earth. That's us, remarks a woman beside him. The line resonates with crushing irony. Grainier, a relic of axe and sweat and timber, is confronted with a "us" he no longer recognizes – humanity hurtling into space while he remains tethered to the earth he helped tame, now utterly alienated from the progress he enabled.
His final moments offer a breathtaking release. Grainier takes a ride in a biplane on a spring day. As the plane loops through the air, he gazes down upon the vast landscape – the forests he felled, the rivers he crossed – now seen from a literal and metaphorical higher perspective. The narration (Will Patton, perfectly sparse) reveals Grainier died peacefully in his sleep that November. But in those final moments of flight, as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt, at last, connected to it all. It’s a transcendent moment. Untethered from the earth that defined and confined him, lost in the sky, he achieves a unity with the universe – nature, progress, memory, loss – that eluded him in life.
This ending crystallizes the film's profound theme. The railroad paved the way for the spaceship; Progress, cold and mechanical, inevitably wins. But its victory comes at the cost of the "wild magic," the deep silences, and the raw, intimate connection to the land that Grainier embodied. He dies as the last of a species – the American pioneer who witnessed the brutal, beautiful birth of the modern world from the fading embers of the wilderness. He is the ghost haunting the very progress he helped build.
“Train Dreams" is a somber, breathtaking masterpiece of atmosphere and understatement. Bentley crafts not just a faithful adaptation, but a cinematic séance, summoning the spirit of a lost America through Edgerton’s monumental performance and Veloso’s sublime imagery. The ending is its crowning achievement – a poignant, ambiguous, and ultimately transcendent meditation on time, loss, and the price of progress. If the elegiac strains of Terrence Malick or the frontier sorrow of Cormac McCarthy resonate with you, this film is essential viewing. It lingers, a quiet ache, a whispered eulogy for a world, and a man, consumed by the future they helped create. See it. Absorb it. Let its haunting beauty settle in your bones. (Neo, 2026)