Train Dreams

This week’s pick is Train Dreams: a quiet, meditative Netflix drama adapted from Denis Johnson’s novella, following the life of Robert Grainer (Joel Edgerton) — a logger and railroad worker drifting through early 20th-century America. It’s the kind of film that feels like a memory: sparse dialogue, heavy atmosphere, and a sense of time moving faster than any one person can keep up with.

The opening sets the tone immediately: rail tracks, a tunnel, Will Patton’s voiceover, and an image that pays off later — boots nailed to a tree, slowly swallowed by nature. From there it’s a whole life in fragments: brutal work camps, quiet domestic joy, sudden violence, and the long, haunted aftermath of loss.

What we talked about

• A “Western” that isn’t really a Western — frontier vibes at first, then you realise you’re watching the world modernise around one man who can’t.
• Work as a lifetime trap: logging season, railroad labour, the “build it for someone else” feeling, and the way corporations just roll on regardless.
• The Chinese labour thread and the early sequence where a Chinese worker is taken and thrown from the bridge — and how that moment sits with Grainer for decades.
• William H. Macy as the old explosives guy: funny, weary, and then brutally, pointlessly lost.
• The wildfire: Grainer racing home, the cabin gone, wife and daughter gone off-screen — and the film refusing to give closure, so you feel the same unresolved grief he does.
• The recurring motif of time erasing everything: the boots, the forest reclaiming, bridges made obsolete, progress moving on without sentiment.
• The late-film whiplash into modernity: Grainer seeing spaceflight on a shop-window TV, then taking a plane ride — an old man briefly touching the future.
• Nick Cave over the end credits, and how the score and natural lighting carry the whole thing.

Verdict

A beautifully shot, melancholy life-story film: quiet, heavy, and surprisingly moving. Joel Edgerton is superb, and the movie’s best trick is making the audience feel the scale of time — and the smallness of one person inside it.

Strong recommend, especially if you’re in the mood for something reflective rather than plot-driven.

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