There are some minor spoilers ahead for Train Dreams, which you can watch now with a Netflix subscription.
I was lucky enough to know my great-grandmother. I was a teenager when she died in the 1990s. After watching Train Dreams last week, I spoke with a colleague here at CinemaBlend, and she brought up how remarkable it was that Robert (played by Joel Edgerton) transitioned from a simple 19th-century life to witnessing John Glenn’s spaceflight on television. Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about my great-grandmother, what she saw in her life, and how it wasn’t completely unlike what Robert experienced.
She Was Born In 1899
Nana was born in late 1899 in a small town in Missouri. She died in St. Louis in 1991. She saw almost all of the 20th century and what came with it. She lived through both World Wars and started a family right as the Depression was about to rock the country. She witnessed the advent of cars, airplanes, rocket ships to space, the radio, television, and even the dawn of the internet. When I think about how different life was when she was born compared to how it looked when she died, it’s astounding.
One story that I keep coming back to in my memories was one she told me when I was probably 9 or 10. She told me of the time that electricity was first installed on her street in her small town. I don’t know what year it was, but sometime in the 19-aughts. She was obviously old enough to remember it, how excited they all were, and how strange they found it. Like Robert in Train Dreams, before that, she and her family were living a life not that dissimilar from how humans have lived for most of recorded history. The advent of electricity changed so much about how we live.
She Outlived Everyone, And Left Her Mark
Nana’s husband, my great-grandfather, died in the late 1960s. He was a salesman for a canned produce company (another 20th-century innovation, at least on a mass scale) and was on the road when it happened. She outlived her only daughter, my grandmother. She outlived almost all of her friends. That was obviously hard on her, but she also got to know her great-grandchildren. Like, really got to know them.
This is where her story differs from Robert’s. He outlived everyone he knew, but under more tragic circumstances, and, as the movie points out, he left nothing behind. No children, no family, not really even a home. That doesn’t diminish his story or his existence; it just makes it different. Nana left behind a legacy that many in my family remember, and her stories, like the one about electricity, are still being told to the next generation, her great-great-grandkids.
Train Dreams, easily one of the best movies on the 2025 movie schedule and one of the best things to stream on Netflix right now, is a contemplative, slow-moving, and sad movie, but it won’t leave you depressed. The action is minimal, but the message is universal. It is a movie that really sits with the viewer and sticks with them for days. Sometimes the best movies are the ones that, a week later, you realize you’re still thinking about often, and that’s what this Clint Bentley-directed masterpiece does. My life is nothing like that of an early 20th-century logger in Idaho, but that doesn’t mean I can’t find common ground with Robert.