Sometimes I think I am destined to become someone like Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) in Train Dreams (2025).  Then again, only God knows my destiny, so I cannot say this with any degree of certainty.  If you are familiar with this movie, that initial statement might seem depressing.  As will become clear from reading the synopsis, Robert has his shares of struggles, and they haunt him for his entire life.  One of my friends that is currently staying with commented that Robert is depressed.  I am not sure that is the case, and I will explore this idea further as we go along.  The only thing left to warn you about, in case any of this interests you, is that what I will be describing is slow moving.  My first word was atmospheric.  My friend called it cerebral.  Whatever it is, I was moved, and I think you will be as well.

Then again, it is difficult to say anything moves Robert in the first few scenes of Train Dreams.  The narrator (Will Patton), who fills us in on Robert’s life throughout, cannot tell us from where Robert comes.  The earliest memory of his is him as a young boy on a train by himself with a sign displaying the name of an Idaho town in which he is to be dropped.  From there, he grows into adulthood and begins working at a number of jobs, mostly as a logger in the Pacific Northwest.  When he is not away from town, he does what anyone else would do, things like going to church.  It is while coming out of service one day that he meets Gladys Olding (Felicity Jones).  They have a brief romance before they decide to marry and build a cottage in the woods along a creek.  For the next few years, life is about the sorrowful times he spends away from the homestead cutting wood, and the happier ones when he is home.  During one of these expeditions, he is called upon to work clearing a lane for the railroad and providing lumber for a bridge across a gorge.  It is in this stint that he witnesses a worker from China, Fu Sheng (Alfred Hsing), being dragged to the bridge and arbitrarily dumped over the side to fall to his death.  As this unfolds, all Robert can muster is “What did he do?” and his feeble attempt at helping is met with kicks from Fu.  That Robert might have been able to do more haunts him for the rest of his life, as does Fu’s face.  The only real comfort is the time he spends with his new family.  Gladys comes to cherish those moments, too, and suggests that her and their daughter might travel with them.  He rejects the idea, stating that it is too dangerous.  We see how this is so when we witness the death of Arn Peeples (William H. Macy), who is killed when a falling branch lands on him from a great height.  Arn had been one of Robert’s few friends, and the old timer’s passing is taken as a sign that Robert could have done more for Fu.  Upon returning home following this incident, Robert gives further consideration to not going back to logging.  He does odd jobs around town, but the work is not steady.  The Grainiers are poor, but they are happy, and in order to keep this going, Gladys suggests they convert to farming and open a lumber mill.  That takes more funds than they currently possess, so Robert needs one more stint cutting wood.  This time, though, he comes back to a forest fire.  There is chaos at the train station, and his calls for his wife and child go answered.  He walks partway through the flames before collapsing.  Upon coming to, he finds the site where his cabin had been, but no sign of Gladys or their toddler daughter.  He spends week searching the woods and town in hopes that he might find them, but he has no luck.  He then stays at the place of devastation thinking they might come back, but, again, this does not materialize.  Instead, he hears their ghosts while trying to put his life back together.  To this end, he is helped by Ignatius Jack (Nathaniel Arcand), the storekeeper who becomes close to Robert in the wake of the tragedy.  It is enough to get Robert back to logging, but with the years that have passed, he finds that the industry has modernized too much and he feels like an old timer.  Thus, he goes back to Idaho permanently, and inherits two horses and a wagon when Ignatius Jack suddenly dies.  By the way, this is the only concrete Catholic reference in the film, but I digress.  With these tools, Robert begins hauling freight around the area.  Sometimes, this includes taking passengers where they need to go, and this is how he meets Claire Thompson (Kerry Condon).  She has come to this part of the country to be a ranger for the newly created United States Forest Service.  Being in his twilight years, he still finds he is full of regret, which manifests itself in dreams that blur reality.  At one point, he finds an injured girl in the woods that he swears is his long-lost daughter.  However, after treating her broken leg, he awakens in the morning to an empty bed and no trace of her.  It gets to be a little much, and he shares his experiences with Claire, who is the first person he has opened up to in decades.  They share about both losing their spouses before their time.  Nothing romantic happens between them, though, and he lives into the 1960s.  The last thing we seem him doing before dying in his bed is taking an airplane ride, something he never dreamed of doing in all his years.

The fact that Robert dies alone in his bed in the middle of the woods is a fitting ending to Train Dreams.  In his conversation with Claire, she refers to him as a hermit, and one imagines that this is how such a person might go from this world.  He gets a little defensive about this label, but she counters by saying that everyone is a hermit in their own way.  There is some truth to this statement from a Catholic perspective.  The Scriptural reference that comes to mind is the Book of Ecclesiastes.  Throughout its chapters, one of the oft repeated phrases is “there is a time for everything.”  This means there is a time to have a family as well as to be alone.  More broadly, it refers to the fact that God has a plan for all of us.  In terms of everything occurring at its appointed time, it pertains to bad and good epochs.  This is clearly and beautifully shown in the movie.  Robert comes of age, marries, experiences loss and the concomitant grief, and learns to cope.  The fact that he “copes,” though, is too small a word for what we go through with him.  While he gets by, what he has difficulty doing is letting go.  With Fu, the brutality of what Robert is a bystander to is not something that anyone should have to see.  God does not equip everyone to deal with that kind of situation, and there is no wrong reaction outside of actively taking part in the killing.  The problem lies in letting those feelings of guilt linger on your heart, which is what Robert does.  To his credit, he does not let it debilitate him.  At the same time, one wonders what might have been had his family survived.  Here, too, the Book of Ecclesiastes can help.  Another of its famous phrases is “vanity or vanities.  All things are vanity!”  In other words, nothing we do has any permanence.  All we have left in the end is God and the love He has for us.  A family and/or friends, or anything else, can approximate that love, but they are mere passing vanities.  The only way we can have anything real is by trusting in God.

Despite that previous statement, and the movie’s ethereal quality, Train Dreams is a visceral experience.  If you can take a slow-moving film, there is much to be gained from watching it.  In short, it gets my recommendation.