This article contains major character or plot details.
Train Dreams begins by introducing us into the world of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) at the steady, even pace of a steam engine, emerging from a tunnel and into the light of a towering forest. It ends decades later with Robert soaring through the air in a biplane, looking down over the same earth where he’d spent his life working among the trees, and in the dirt. A life filled with love and loss has left him with perhaps nothing much of material value, but still, as the narrator (Will Patton) intones, Robert “felt, at last, connected to it all.”
In between those moments, a whole life is lived — one filled with moments of quiet ecstasy, profound grief, solitude and community, joy and regret. Robert is haunted by the things he didn’t do and by those he did. His existence has an almost elemental simplicity — he lived most of his years within the space of a few hundred square miles in the Pacific Northwest; though he traveled to within a dozen miles of it, he never saw the ocean — and yet he, and his fellow loggers and railroad workers of the early 20th century, helped build the bridges to a future they’d only get to see glimpses of, one that wouldn’t have existed without their labor.
Directed by Clint Bentley, with a screenplay by Bentley and Greg Kwedar (the duo also co-wrote the Academy Award-nominated screenplay for Sing Sing, which Kwedar directed) adapted from Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, Train Dreams has a hymn-like quality, in that it builds on itself, expanding and soaring, in exaltation of life itself, with all its pains and pleasures.
Below, Bentley, Kwedar, Edgerton, and others speak about their relationship to Train Dreams, how it grapples with the overwhelming experience of losing everything, and the way that, as Edgerton says, “Despite all the things that knock us down, human beings are incredibly good at standing back up.”
What happens to Gladys and Katie?
Robert’s life comprises long periods of solitude, with the notable exception of his marriage to Gladys (Felicity Jones). He spent his early years drifting, with nothing “much attracting his interest, until that is” he met Gladys, who “introduced herself as if women did things like that every day.” Their love is one that moves slowly, with deliberation, so that it’s almost a surprise when one day they look around, and they’ve built a foundation to a house, and then a family, with their daughter Katie.
For Jones, that cadence and the feeling of the expansiveness of time informed how she moved through the world of her character. “It was very much about immersing myself in the slowness of that time,” she says. “It’s quite interesting to think that there wouldn’t be all the distractions that we have now. Gladys has a deep sense of self and confidence, and that comes through her physicality; her voice, through the way she walks.”
The love between Robert and Gladys is a tender one, and it only expands when their daughter Katie is born. Even when Robert leaves their home for long stretches of time to work felling trees and building railroads, his home stays with him, his thoughts are never far from his family.
It is then a tragedy of inconceivable proportions when he returns to his town, on his way home, only to find the sky alight with flame and the air choking with ash. Robert rushes into the fire trying to find any sign of his wife and daughter, but they are gone. Only he remains. And he must learn how to live his life again. He’s helped by seeing how the natural world around him regenerates, even after total devastation.
“It’s a movie about how to choose light again after loss,” says Kwedar. “He could have let his spirit fully be destroyed, and yet [he recovers] partly through the renewal that happens around [him in] this forest, but also largely due to the kindness of friends and strangers, and the role that other people play in navigating pain and loss in our lives. It’s a movie about how you stand back up again, and there’s a role that people in our community play in enabling that to fully happen.”
Who is the “wolf girl”? Is she Katie? And what happened with Fu Sheng?
While Robert learns to navigate a world without his wife and daughter, he can’t help but be haunted by their disappearance — as well as by other painful parts of his past, including when he stood by and witnessed the murder of one of his fellow railroad workers, a Chinese laborer named Fu Sheng (Alfred Hsing).
In the depths of his grief over the loss of his family, Robert is visited by this man, whose death has followed him for years, and he ponders the connections between the events of his life.
Bentley says, “We feel [Fu Sheng’s] presence across the entire film, reverberating through Grainier’s life as he’s grappling with grief and the guilt of the experience that he had with [him].”
“There was something that Alfred talked about. An [important] aspect of the movie is making note of the Chinese immigrant population who really built a lot of the railroad infrastructure and then were not celebrated throughout history for that,” Bentley says. “Even though the film is not explicitly about [that], it was really important in working with Alfred to name this character, to show the life that he had leading up to this moment and the dreams that he had and the hopes that he had for his life, despite how his life turned out.”
Fu Sheng’s visits to Robert are only in his mind, but Robert is visited by someone later in the film whose presence evokes his daughter, years after he lost her. Whether or not she’s really there is hard to know for sure.
Not long after falling sick with an intense fever, a girl — who seems to be more wolf than human — comes into his home, hurt. Robert isn’t sure if he’s imagining it. The narrator says, “he knew it was impossible,” but still, he wants to believe it’s his daughter, home again, and that he alone can heal her.
“It’s not exactly clear if it’s actually what’s happening, or if it’s just happening in his mind,” says Bentley, “but it’s his way of processing his grief, this kind of strange reunion with his daughter — or with this child who may or may not be his daughter. It was a very pivotal scene to the movie. It’s very pivotal to the book. It was a really delicate scene to get right because it is Grainier’s way of processing his grief. It was always a balancing act of trying to find the beauty of it and the sweetness of the reunion that he’s having, whether he’s having it in his mind or whether it’s really happening and balancing that sweetness with the tragedy and the horror of it, of what he’s going through … And whether it’s real or not, I don’t really know, but I don’t know that it really matters, because that’s what’s important for him at that moment.”
How does Claire help Robert?
By the time that Robert meets Claire Thompson (Kerry Condon), he’s isolated himself from the rest of the world due to his grief over the loss of his family. In a sense, Claire is everything Robert never had the chance to be: She’s a world traveler, a person who leads a life of adventure. But despite their differences, she doesn’t judge him, instead telling him, “The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit.”
And, in fact, Claire has also suffered grief, and she is also alone. But she shows Robert a different way of embracing this kind of life. For Condon, this was a huge part of Claire’s appeal.
“She was kind of comfortable with the solitude, she was kind of at ease with it,” says Condon. “Whereas [with Robert], it was a bit more like fate had decided it for him. There was a loneliness to him, whereas Claire was a little more at ease, I think, with her solitude.”
Edgerton also loved that Robert and Claire’s relationship didn’t follow any predictable narrative tropes. “What’s beautiful about it on a story level, is the typical thing that the audience might feel about Robert’s relationship with Claire, is that there’s this possibility of new romance,” he says. “And I love that while that may occur to an audience, that it will feel like Robert’s looking for something to replace Gladys, I think what’s very honorable is that he’s not thinking to replace Gladys.”
Instead, Edgerton explains, Robert is “questioning his removal of himself from community, and human life. He’s relegated himself to be somewhat of a hermit … until this curiosity about another human being sparks, but it’s not about romance. It’s about community and about friendship, and about talking out loud to another person.”
“It’s the one moment later in his life where he gets to say the things out loud that are living inside of him about the feelings he has about his grief, which I think is an important process for all of us in expressing our grief,” Edgerton says. “In order to move through it, grief needs to come out of us in some way.”
“These scenes are incredibly important and far more potent because it’s not about any kind of sexual overtones or romance,” he continues. “It’s about two human beings actually being able to have time as friends. And part of the reason that it’s so potent in the film is because it’s in the hands of Kerry.”
What happens at the end of Train Dreams?
While there are extraordinary things that happen throughout Robert Grainier’s life — from the wondrous to the tragic — so much of its power comes from its very ordinariness, from the moments that we don’t even realize matter until they’ve slipped away.
In the end, Robert is alone again, walking down the streets of Spokane, Washington; peering into a store window at a TV broadcasting an astronaut’s orbit around the Earth. “Oh, is that …?” he wonders out loud, as he sees the curve of our planet on the screen. “That’s us,” a woman tells him.
Robert’s life is something he might never fully comprehend. He realizes, the narrator says, “that he was only just beginning to have a faint understanding of his life, even though it was now slipping away from him.”
“It’s a story about how we move past grief and how we pick up the pieces of our lives and move forward even when we’ve gone through something really tragic,” Bentley explains. “Greg and I were writing this film during the pandemic, and then we were making the film coming out of the pandemic. So many of us are still contending with the fact that life has changed irrevocably and doesn’t always make sense. And yet, how do you move on? How do you pick up the pieces and keep going? This story of Grainier and what he goes through is a really resonant exploration of that. I think at the end of the day, it’s about how life is worth living, with all the beautiful moments and the sad moments and the darkness and the light that we encounter. It’s all worth it in the end for the experience of it.”
That experience will be something different for all of us; the connections we make are not always to each other, even if we might all be connected in ways we can’t easily see. It’s that epic aspect of existence that Train Dreams speaks to, that reminder that we’re all part of something bigger than we can even fathom.
“It’s rare, I think, in a movie, that the whole movie in its totality comes close to that sensation you have when you’re standing at the foot of one of these great old-growth trees,” says Kwedar. “That’s maybe what the experience of the whole movie is — to try and get to that sensation, that breathless sensation, of both how small we are and also how we’re just a blip, but not in a way that feels meaningless. There’s a comfort that comes from it, from the fact that you’re wrapped in the same story that the tree is part of.”
As for Robert, we last see him in that plane, soaring above the earth — his earth — and the pilot tells him something that perhaps we could all stand to remind ourselves from time to time, as we speed through days and years that slide by faster and faster: “Hey, you’d better hold onto something.”
Train Dreams is streaming now on Netflix.
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