“Bentley approaches America’s history as a myth – not one to be destroyed or reinterpreted, but one to be revered.”

At a surface level Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, based on Denis Johnson’s eponymous novel, uses the fictional story of a single man’s life – Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), a day laborer in the American West – to engage with the profound and radical changes that transformed the country’s history and landscape. As we follow Grainier’s journey as a logger helping to build the railroads cross-country, Bentley underscores the fact that America’s history is deeply intertwined with its westward expansion. Just as Grainier becomes a man on the road, America becomes a country through its continuous expansion.

In this sense, Train Dreams succeeds precisely in those moments when it recognizes the impossibility of addressing the full scope of America’s territorial expansion and transformation. It is in these moments that Grainier’s story, rather than the broader historical narrative, takes center stage. In these beautiful instances, every aspect of his life – whether good or bad – is treated tenderly, as if Bentley is seeking to extract an almost esoteric meaning from the most mundane events. One might even argue that Terrence Malick’s influence is present here, particularly in the possibility of reading explicitly religious themes through a secular lens. However, Bentley replaces Malick’s loose narrative and loose editing structure with a more intimate and focused approach to both a specific historical moment and Grainier’s life.

Bentley’s observational narrative understands from the outset how small a single man’s life can seem in the grand scheme of things. Yet, Train Dreams is not solely about Grainier. It reminds us that we are all equally small in the face of the violent backdrop of history. We each play our part, but like any play, those parts linger long after the actors have withered away, constantly being replaced one by one. “God needs the hermit in the woods as much as He needs the man in the pulpit,” writes Denis Johnson in his novel. Bentley translates this idea to the screen by underscoring that no man is entitled to his role. God has written the play, and we are each given a part to act for a fleeting season.

One moment in the film that makes this clear occurs when Grainier meets his wife, Gladys (Felicity Jones), at Sunday mass and experiences love for the first time – he never knew his parents, after all. He steps into a new role: first, as a faithful man who attends church every Sunday in hopes of meeting Gladys again; then as a husband and father. These changes alter the course of his life, but they are also common experiences shared with every other man he works alongside.

However, the film’s dualistic approach occasionally feels schizophrenic, as it struggles to reconcile the micro and macro aspects of the story. The broader historical forces will inevitably overshadow the intimate moments, as Grainier’s motivations are tied directly to the moment in American history in which he lives. When he struggles to find decent pay, it’s because the war is affecting the economy. When he is forced to leave his wife and child for months to work with men he doesn’t know or care for, it’s because the country needs him to clear a path for the railroad. And every casual display of violence – such as when a Chinese family is deported – is not random but calculated. As America clears its forests to lay the tracks of progress, it also shapes the very identity of those who will come to call themselves Americans. And this, then, often means erasing the immigrants who helped build the country.

To put it another way, Bentley approaches America’s history as a myth – not one to be destroyed or reinterpreted, but one to be revered. It’s a tale told with warmth, a knowledge that must be shared, much like a religious text. Curiously, Will Patton’s narration not only reinforces this ceremonial approach to the American myth but also highlights how Bentley plays it safe when adapting the novel to the screen. At times, Train Dreams feels less like cinema and more like an audio-visual reading of a book.

Much like Grainier, we are all small actors who will eventually be replaced in the eternal play of history. Yet this certainty also comes with a harsh truth: some roles are (unfortunately) perceived as more important than others. In avoiding this reality, Train Dreams struggles to balance the two stories it attempts to tell simultaneously. At the end of the day, if we are to view America’s history as the film’s foundation, we must acknowledge that the pages of this history book are made from the trees that stood before the country existed. The glue that binds those pages together is the blood of the native peoples, enslaved individuals, immigrants, and other marginalized groups whose labor built what we now call America. And even Grainier’s marriage shows that the nuclear family has become the dominant, if not the only, form of communal experience in individual-oriented and communal-phobic America.