Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones appear in Train Dreams by Clint Bentley, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Adolpho Veloso.
One of the big break-out success stories of Sundance 2025, so far, is “Train Dreams,” the 102 minute film based on Denis Johnson’s novella. Director Clint Bentley premiered the film on January 26th at the Library Center Theatre in Park City and it has since been snapped up by Netflix for a figure said to be “in the high teen millions.” Only Alison Brie’s and Dave Franco’s horror film “Together,” bought by WME Independent, has created more buzz this year so far about a Sundance purchase.
Black Bear productions, established by Teddy Schwarzman in 2011 to market quality films to the UK, Ireland and Canada is behind this film. Schwarzman, a former lawyer, was behind 2014’s “The Imitation Game.” Now he is involved with Director Clint Bentley’s look at the areas where logging and the railroad were big industries at the turn of the century as the country was laying railroad(s).
That theme attracted me to this film, since my Norwegian immigrant grandfather was said to have helped lay the B&O Railroad (before dying young of Tuberculosis). I was also familiar with cast members Joel Edgerton, William H. Macy, Felicity Jones, Clifton Collins, Jr., and narrator Will Patton. Add to that that the fact that the director co-wrote and produced “Sing Sing” for A24 and won a 2021 Sundance U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Best Actor and I’m in.
The film pulls from the novella of the same name. Screenwriters (Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar) have adapted its poetic language, as when the film opens with these words: “There were once passageways to the old way. Even though that has been rolled up like a scroll and put somewhere, you can still feel the echo of it.”
Clint Bentley, director of Train Dreams, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Clint Bentley.
Robert Grainier is a logger who works for $4 a day and travels to where the trees are, whether in Bonnie’s Ferry, Idaho, as far east as the town of Libby, 40 miles inside the state of Idaho, or in the Spokane area. Grainier is portrayed by Joel Edgerton (“Loving”) and he is a bit of an enigma. He (somehow) lost his original family and watched Chinese families being mass deported from his former home town. Robert quit attending school in his early teens and his life really starts when he meets Gladys at church.
Within three months the couple are inseparable and build a cabin on an acre of wooded land. Soon, they have a daughter, Kate, but Robert is constantly leaving their small cabin in the woods to work alongside men from Shanghai and Chattanooga as a logger. In the summer of 1917 he worked for the Spokane International Railroad and witnessed racism against Chinese laborers, who were sometimes summarily executed without cause, which bothered Robert’s conscience a great deal.
In the course of his work as a logger, Robert met many characters, including one portrayed by William H. Macy who used explosives to fell trees—sometimes successfully. In another incident, a Black man crashes into the logging camp, demanding to know the whereabouts of a man named Sam Loving from New Mexico. When one of the loggers makes a break for it (apparently because he IS Sam Loving) that man ends up dead, shot in the back. Incidents like these, including details about Hank Heeley, who lived in the trunk of a felled tree, comprise the narrative.
In between these logging adventures, Robert returns to his family in the small cabin in the woods and to his beloved wife Gladys and daughter Kate although he says, “He began to feel a dread, like some punishment was seeking him.”
When Robert returns to his small cabin in the woods this time, there has been a terrible fire (that looked all too reminiscent of the recent Los Angeles fires.) His cabin and family are gone. For two weeks he searches for Gladys and Kate. The acting in the scenes where Edgerton is mourning his lost family and sleeping outside, exposed to the elements, are especially good and the cinematography of the area (Adolpho Veloso) is gorgeous.
The visual effects of the fire, coupled with great vistas and good sound all contribute to a superior film. Robert held out some faint hope that Gladys and Kate might still be alive and come home, so he lived on speckled trout during the summer and began rebuilding the cabin. As the novella said, “He wandered the city as though he were looking for something he had lost, out of time and space. He kept waiting for his wife and daughter to return.”
While in a theater in town, Robert sees his face in a mirror for the first time in a decade, and says, “He felt that he was just only beginning to have some faint understanding of his life, even though it was now slipping away from him.”
Aside from the logging adventures (later, he takes a job helping move people) the main message is that Robert spends what is left of his life mourning his lost family. The film also comments on racism in America. This made it a fine companion piece to the Sundance film “Third Act” that I had just watched, which referenced discrimination against Japanese Americans and the interment of Japanese Americans during WWII.
It’s a beautifully done film with good acting and some historical worth, as well.
