Trees are a major character in Train Dreams. They aren’t just beautiful (though they certainly are beautifully shot by cinematographer Adolpho Veloso). They’re meaningful. In the haunting new film from writer-director Clint Bentley (out today on Netflix), trees act almost like avatars of the divine presence—the Creator who gives life and takes it, a God who is our shelter and shade but also a consuming fire.

Based on Denis Johnson’s novella—a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—Train Dreams is about a lot of things. It’s about America: westward expansion, Pacific Northwest frontier grit, rugged individualism. It’s about a man: Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), an orphaned boy turned railroad worker and woodsman whose lifespan the story narrates. But it’s also about God: little spoken of in the film but palpably present.

Johnson is a Hemingwayesque writer who became a Christian in midlife, writing acclaimed essays with titles like “Bikers for Jesus.” His writing is spiritually curious if not explicitly Christian. Train Dreams has a transcendental vibe that feels inspired by Walt Whitman or Henry David Thoreau. The prose is terse and masculine but imbued with an existential wonder. Bentley’s film captures all this well, in a style unmistakably indebted to Terrence Malick (especially Tree of Life).

Yet it’d be unjust to write off Train Dreams as a Malick knockoff. Bentley is a formidable talent in his own right (see his 2021 debut Jockey or last year’s Sing Sing, which he cowrote). And Train Dreams announces him as a major American talent. It’s one of the best films of the year.

He Gives and Takes Away

Train Dreams (rated PG-13) evokes Malick’s style (elliptical editing, ponderous voiceover, golden-hour cinematography) but also his themes—especially Tree of Life’s focus on the parallel tracks of life’s beauty and pain. The Book of Job looms large in Malick’s magnum opus, with one character explicitly referencing Job 1:21 (“The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away”) in response to a tragic death.

That tension also frames the drama of Train Dreams, the “dreams” of which sometimes look Edenic and sometimes nightmarish. Grainier’s life is full of transcendent beauty and unimaginable tragedy; sublime bursts of joy and heartache haunt him. Life for Grainier is both blessed and cursed.

This is our world: jarring contrasts, highs and lows, verdant springtimes and cruel winters. It’s almost like there’s a design to it, a harmony that makes it meaningful.

This is our world: jarring contrasts, highs and lows, verdant springtimes and cruel winters.

Trees underscore this. The film foregrounds how trees give life. They bless us in their oxygen-producing, shade-providing life. And they bless us in their death. The cutting down of trees provides shelter in the form of houses (Grainier builds his own log cabin twice in the film), fuel for fires that help us survive winter, lumber for industry, and materials for infrastructure—railroads, bridges—that opened up the West. In the death of trees, there is life.

But trees are also means of death, something the film notes explicitly several times. A miscalculated felling of a large spruce turns deadly for a handful of unfortunate men crushed in the giant timber’s path. A dead branch falls and happens to hit a man walking underneath at the wrong time. Most fearsomely, trees become agents of death by spreading wildfire—turning an idyllic, enchanted forest into a hellish inferno, beloved homes into ash.

“The dead tree is as important as the living one,” one character observes. “There must be something we can learn from that.”

Indeed, trees teach us what Grainier comes to see: that all things work together, both the hard things and the good, both in nature and one’s own life. There’s a design we need not understand to acknowledge.

In a memorable scene (featured prominently in the trailer), one character says, “Beautiful, ain’t it?” to which Grainier replies, “What is?” The character responds, in one of his last words before death, “All of it. Every bit of it.”

The line is the film’s thesis. Life in its anguish, as well as in its bliss, is a beautiful gift to acknowledge and embrace. Even if we can’t control or understand it.

Small Life, Big World

Bentley’s script—which he cowrote with Sing Sing collaborator Greg Kwedar—does a marvelous job juxtaposing one small, unknown life with a big, mysterious universe.

Featuring the distinctive voice of Will Patton as the narrator, the story follows Grainier’s life from his obscure beginnings as an orphaned child sent to Idaho on the Great Northern railroad, from an unknown place and unknown parents. His is a “hidden life” that plays out against the backdrop of a rapidly changing America, from the 19th-century pioneer days to the invention of television and space travel.

Occasionally, Grainier feels directly affected by this wider world. The Great War influences his job prospects. The Great Depression takes its toll. The macroeconomic needs of American industry intertwine with Grainier’s microeconomic livelihood.

But mostly Grainier just lives quietly in his little acreage near Bonners Ferry, Idaho, in a Thoreauvian cabin in the woods where he’s building a life with a loving wife (Felicity Jones) he met at church. Their baby daughter Kate makes his dangerous work feel more worth it. He wants to provide for her, perhaps giving her joy and opportunities he didn’t have. The American dream.

Here’s a man who works hard, his head down and an axe over his shoulder. Simple ambitions: love and protect his family, work with a sturdy hand, help others where he can. When he fails to protect others—as in a pivotal early scene when a Chinese railroad worker is threatened by fellow track laborers—it pricks his conscience and haunts him for years.

Malick’s Tree of Life jarringly juxtaposed the micro (nuclear family in 1950s Texas) and the macro (the literal cosmos, from its creation until its death) in a way echoed here. But Train Dreams tackles the contrast in a more modest way. There are no dinosaurs or asteroid impacts, yet there are frequent references to how mind-bogglingly old creation is (“The world’s an old place. Probably nothing it hasn’t seen by now”) and how minuscule our lives are by comparison. The effect is powerful. It’s one life as a lens to contemplate the cosmos. The universe in a Grainier of sand.

See Life from a Bigger View

Edgerton is an underrated actor and inhabits Grainier’s character with uncanny power. He gives the character a strapping stoicism that’s strong but also quietly vulnerable; he’s a man who speaks little but says a lot with his eyes. It’s rare and refreshing to see such an honoring portrait of a man in contemporary film. Grainier is a husband, a father, a provider, a friend; “a steady man,” as Johnson’s book describes him.

Late in the film, he looks in a mirror and sees a reflection of his face for the first time in nearly a decade. He’s not a ruminating overprocessor, even though his trauma and pain are real. He opens up emotionally to friends on occasion. But mostly he works through his pain in his sleep, his haunting dreams excavating layers of unspoken emotion. In waking life, he may be unmistakably world-weary, but he doesn’t complain. He keeps his hand to the proverbial plow. He copes not by laboring to understand what’s ultimately unanswerable but by simply pressing on.

It’s not that Grainier isn’t curious about the “why” behind his life’s traumas. It’s just that he knows he has a limited perspective on how it all fits into the broader workings and mysteries of the world. Moments of perspective loom large in the film. Grainier stands with a friend on a forest service lookout tower and sees a larger view of the landscape. At one point in his old age, he takes a $4 single-engine plane flight to “see the world as only the birds do.” In a rare visit to a city in 1962, he pauses by a TV screen in a storefront window to see John Glenn’s first images of Earth, as seen from space. “So is that—?” Grainier asks a woman on the street. She replies, “That’s us.”

Here’s a man who works hard, his head down and an axe over his shoulder. Simple ambitions: love and protect his family, work with a sturdy hand, help others where he can.

The line has meaning for us viewers too. As we watch Grainier’s particular life, in a specific place in time, we’re invited to reflect on our own lives. We may not be bearded lumberjacks, but like Grainier, we’ve been given breath in a particular place and time. We’ve each been given an unfolding life of twists and turns we can’t control and might never understand. But do we need to understand?

The tree in the forest doesn’t know when it’ll be cut down or burned in a fire, or why. It doesn’t need to know. It’s enough to just be a tree while it has the chance to be, putting down roots and breathing out oxygen.

So for us. Your life and mine are like the tree whose every ring of age is known by its sovereign Creator even before it was a seed. Every hair is known by God (Matt. 10:30). Every word, every action, and the precise duration of our lives are known before our first cells took shape (Ps. 139). “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it,” David rightly reflects (v. 6).

Yet even as we can’t have Godlike knowledge—the forbidden fruit of the tree of Genesis 2:17—we can trust our Maker and marvel at all he made: Our lives. Every tree in every forest. Every snow-capped mountain peak. All of it made with intention. All of it made to glorify God.