Intrigue

Based on Denis Johnson's beloved novella, Train Dreams is the moving portrait of Robert Grainier, a logger and railroad worker who leads a life of unexpected depth and beauty in the rapidly-changing America of the early 20th Century.

Set against the rich forests and vistas of the Pacific Northwest in Washington state, we observe the often quiet ebbs and flows of the life of Robert Grainier. Born of parents he can't recall, and destined for a life of laborious, early 20th century work building railways and logging he finds his true meaning and purpose upon meeting Gladys. Robert and Gladys soon decide that they will build a quiet life together next to a beautiful and secluded stream, and they will have a child together. Due to the long absences of Robert for his work, and local work at the time not being lucrative enough they both dream of using their modest land to build a sawmill and have a closer family life. Tragedy ensues while Robert is away working and saving money, and the struggle of meaning and solitude returns as he waits for signs and searches for the that which made him whole, again.—akspickn

The film recounts the 80 years of the life of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) around Bonners Ferry, Idaho. During his years, Robert traveled far and wide on the railroads. Arriving in the area on the Great Northern Railway as an orphaned child (nobody told him how he lost his original parents). His earliest memory was the mass deportation of 100 or so Chinese families from town. He saw the casualness of the violence for the very first time.

Robert drops out of school and spends his younger years without direction or purpose, until he meets Gladys Olding (Felicity Jones). They marry, build a log cabin with their bare hands along the Moyie River, and have a daughter, Kate. Robert and Gladys are deeply in love with each other.

He takes to railroad construction for the Spokane International Railway in 1917, but witnesses a Chinese worker thrown off the Robinson Gorge bridge by a group of white workers for unclear reasons, and he is continually haunted by visions of the man and dreams of him being struck by a train. Robert returns home to his family and brings gifts from the civilized world. Robert shares stories from his time away from home, including the people he met and the place they had been to. Robert feels that he is not connected to Kate as he was away from home for too long, but Gladys assures him that this will change very quickly.

Robert later takes up seasonal logging work, but it takes him away from Gladys and Kate for long periods of time. He meets many men who leave impressions on him. Robert once worked with a logger for 2 months without exchanging a single word for the entire duration. Then there was Hank Healy who made his home in the hunk of a tree. Apostle Frank (Paul Schneider) a logger who considered himself an expert on the Bible. Turns out Frank had once killed an African American in a race related incident. The dead man's brother tracks Frank down in the jungle and shoots him dead. Arn Peeples is an explosives expert, and the oldest man on most jobs.

Robert and the crew move deeper into the forest as the world's appetite for lumber keeps on growing, changing the face of entire mountainside, making them devoid of any greenery. He also witnesses more tragedies along the way. Several workers are killed by a falling tree, their graves marked by a pair of boots nailed to a tree. The owner of the crew does not even give them a day off to mourn and says that the world does not stop needing wood, just because the loggers had a bad day. Robert grows close to a fellow logger, Arn Peeples (William H. Macy), who is killed by a falling branch. Arn Peeples used to say that cutting trees which have been around for more than 500 years, upsets a man's soul.

Robert returns home at the end of every logging season to spend time with his family. Gladys suggests that she and Kate go with Robert during the logging season, but Robert knows that it is a hard life and is also very dangerous.

Robert tries to take up work closer to home but struggles in the post-World War I economy. He and Gladys decide to farm and build a lumber mill so he can stop logging, but Robert returns from his final season of logging. He earns $4 per day in wages to gather enough money to open a saw-mill back home. Robert begins to feel the dread as if some punishment was seeking him.

Robert returns home at the end of the season to discover the cabin destroyed in a wildfire that burned through the entire town, with Gladys and Kate missing. A despondent Robert waits for his family under the open skies at the location of the cabin for many nights, even in cold and rain. He is eventually brought company by his friend, Ignatius Jack (Nathaniel Arcand) the local grocer from whom Robert bought all his supplies, and he rebuilds the cabin, after he realizes that Gladys and Kate are not coming back. In that year a comet appeared in the sky, which signaled the end of days, back in those times. The comet faded away after 2 weeks as quietly as it had come. The rebuilt cabin was like the first one, but Robert could not stand the emptiness of the place. As Robert returns to logging, he finds himself out of place amid new technology and younger, rougher men, and decides to stop.

Robert buys a horse and a cart for $300 in installments, when the owner of the horse cart dies from a heart attack. Robert starts as a freighter and eventually starts moving people in his wagon. Taking a job as a carriage driver for townspeople, he meets Claire Thompson (Kerry Condon) of the United States Forest Service who is in town to conduct a survey, who encourages him. Claire says that the entire valley was under 3000 feet of ice at a point in the distant past, and when the ice broke, it flooded the whole region. Claire's job was to manage timber cuts and prevent forest fires. Robert continually walks through the woods, believing he can feel the spirits of his wife and daughter sometimes, and hopes not to drive them away.

One night, he believes he sees an injured Kate apparently return to the cabin and he tends to her wounds, but after a night of dreams he awakens to no sign she was ever there. He determines to continue living in the cabin in case she ever returns. Years go by, and the world changes around an aging and weathered Robert, who rides the Great Northern into Spokane, witnessing John Glenn's flight into space on a television.

On a spring day when Robert decides to fly in a biplane. As the plane loops and circles in the air, sights and sounds of people and places throughout his life pass through his mind. The narrator recounts that Robert died in his sleep in the cabin in November of 1968, leaving no heirs, but that on that spring day in the plane, "as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt, at last, connected to it all."