A quiet, brooding masterpiece

Train Dreams is a film that captures the Gothic desperation of North Idaho

By Ben Olson
Reader Staff

Underneath the paved streets, the brick buildings, real estate offices and fast-food joints, there exists another North Idaho. It’s buried beneath the modern trappings of a Northwestern resort town, where time has eroded most of the jagged edges – where generations of men lived hard existences cutting away the past to make room for the future, which left them listless and unmoored as they came to terms with their place in the mad growing world before dying and being forgotten to time.

In his novella Train Dreams, Denis Johnson captures the Gothic desperation of our region like no other writer, which makes sense because he made his home near Bonners Ferry for many years before his death in 2017. His writing was steady and gentle, yet frail, like an addict willing himself the strength not to take the next drink. 

Unlike Western writers of the past, who painted romantic pictures of the loggers who tamed the forests or cowboys who smoothed out the range, Johnson was more interested in laying these folks on a gurney and opening their souls to poke around at what gave them joy, what drove them to keep putting their boots on every morning and, most importantly, what haunted them in the still hours of the night.

Johnson’s Train Dreams was adapted into a feature film, masterfully directed by Clint Bentley, who created one of the most poignant portraits of life in the panhandle of Idaho and its surrounding areas.

Recounting the 80 years of life of Robert Grainier, a fictional man who lived and worked around Bonners Ferry about 100 years ago, Train Dreams is a taut, tender film. With a moving performance by Joel Edgerton as Grainier, narration by Will Patton and a host of colorful supporting characters, this film will dig deep into your chest and hang around for a while long after the credits roll.

The film is littered with place names that don’t often find their way onto the silver screen: Bonners Ferry, Moyie River, Noxon, Libby. While it takes place largely in North Idaho and western Montana, Bentley filmed Train Dreams mostly in Washington around Snoqualmie and Metaline Falls, as well as Colville.

An orphaned child with no idea who his parents were or even on which day he was born, Grainier represents one of the many faceless men who haunted this region around the time of the Great War. With an ax on their shoulder and an insatiable hunger for work, these itinerant men toiled in the forests or for the railroad. Some chose to make a life in the panhandle, building simple cabins and trying their damndest to raise a family on the edge of the frontier.

Grainier wandered the woods for years, seemingly without purpose or direction, building railroad bridges, felling large swaths of forest and earning a dollar the tough way. Then he meets Gladys Olding, played by Felicity Jones, and suddenly feels his life has clicked into some kind of groove. No longer is he fighting against a current – he’s joining its flow.

The couple build a cabin alongside the Moyie River and have a daughter they name Kate. Gladys is left to raise the child and keep the home in a land still rough around the edges while Grainier goes off for months at a time to work for the Spokane International Railway, where he meets many colorful characters that leave lasting impressions on him.

There is the Chinese laborer that workers throw off a bridge for an unarticulated reason, a scene that often haunts Grainier in the dark of the night. There are also men with whom he cuts trees for months without uttering a single word to one another.

William H. Macy makes an inspired — albeit brief — performance as Arn Peeples, the busted up old logger who handles all the explosives and acts as a sort of soothsayer, questioning where the never-ending progress will lead them.

The film depicts the brutal reality of this type of work, which is messy, back-breaking and often ends in tragedy. Some workers are killed by falling trees, others are killed by vigilantes seeking justice for evil deeds done in their past. Often, the only memory of their passing is a pair of cork boots nailed to the tree where they were buried – the tree often swallowing the boots whole as the years pass by.

A quiet man among his fellow lumberjacks, Grainier seldom makes friends. He strikes up an amiable relationship with the demolition monkey Peeples, listening as the old man pontificates about this or that. In one scene, Peeples talks to Grainier about the effect this work has on a man.

“We cut down trees that have been here 500 years,” Peeples said. “Upsets a man’s soul whether he recognizes it or not. … This world is intricately stitched together, boys. Every thread we pull, we know not how it affects the design of things. We’re but children on this Earth, pulling bolts out of the Ferris wheel, thinking ourselves to be gods.”

It’s as if Peeples understands that this work they are doing, this raping of the trees from the Earth, is something we’ll regret someday. 

After his long absences take their toll on Gladys, who is left raising Kate mostly by herself, the couple decide to work toward building a farm and sawmill so he can work closer to home. But he couldn’t still the throbbing placelessness that haunted him.

“Grainier worried more and more that something terrible was following him,” the narrator tells us.

Sure enough, while away on his final season of logging to earn the capital for this life change, Grainier returns home to find that tragedy has, indeed, found him. His life turned upside down, Grainier returns to his meandering – kicking at the ghosts around him, working in the woods again only to find the industry changing, leaving him behind. While talking with an ancient logger who could barely tie his shoes, he decides to pack it in and find another line of work. There was something about the old logger that reminded Grainier of himself in the not-too-distant future.

Grainier puts together a stake and buys some horses and a wagon to earn money delivering goods and people around the region. One passenger is Claire Thompson, a widow heading to live the lonely existence of a fire tower lookout for the U.S. Forest Service. Both of them victims of life’s tragic hand, Grainier and Thompson have an important conversation toward the end of the film that perfectly encapsulates the groundless mentality that many feel living in the American West, as if they are ghosts or echoes still traveling about the hills and valleys.

“Just waiting to see what we’ve been left here for,” Thompson tells Grainier.

In his later years, Grainier sees the world move on. Chainsaws replace the crosscut saws he operated in the forests, big steel bridges replace the wooden-trussed ones he built in his youth. He sees buildings reach into the sky, neon lights, a television screen in a shop window showing man going to space, looking back on Earth for the first time. 

Drawn by some desire he couldn’t explain, Grainier ends up taking a ride in a biplane for $4 and, as the pilot nosedives and loops over the land that nearly broke him, Grainier felt something click.

“As he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt, at last, connected to it all,” the narrator said.

Train Dreams is a quiet masterpiece, a perfect encapsulation of the loneliness that exists under our feet, a nostalgic, bitter pill we all swallow, each and every day we wake under the Western sky. 

Drawn from a powerful novella, cast perfectly and executed with grace, Train Dreams is a film that explores what happens after a man’s soul is clear-cut and paved over while he’s still alive. It is both a look back at those who built this land and a look inward at the reasons why, even after such toil, our souls are still not satisfied.