Train Dreams: Does one life matter?

“The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit.”

What is the meaning of a life? That is the underlying question in Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams. The film is a based on a Denis Johnson novella. While it is the story of a single person, set in a specific time and place, there is a universality to the story. It is not just his story, it is the story of us all.

The story begins in the early twentieth century with a boy on a train. Robert Grainer (Joel Edgerton) is a man without a past. He was orphaned as a child and didn’t even know the year he was born. This creates a sense of an isolated life, even from the beginning. He spends his whole life in the Pacific Northwest, never getting beyond the forests and mountains. He never did anything of great significance to the world. Yet, we are compelled as we watch his life to recognize that this is what life is all about.

He worked as a logger and laborer. He worked building a bridge to extend a railroad into the Northwest, extending the technology of the day. But the film covers decades and that technology and the world itself changed drastically, leaving him behind.

His story is like so many others. He falls in love and builds a home and family. (Felicity Jones plays his wife, Gladys.) He witnesses injustice and prejudice and is haunted by the memory. He suffers unspeakable loss. He struggles to move on in his life, but there are those who will aid him along the way.

This not really a plot-driven film; it’s not even just a character study. Rather it is a philosophical observation of what it means to be in the world. If one’s life leaves no discernable footprint, does that person’s existence have meaning? There is a scene when Robert and others bury some other loggers killed on the job. They nail their boots to nearby trees as a sign that they had existed. The surviving loggers knew that lives mattered.

While most of the film is told visually, with a voiceover narration to point to the passage of time, there are moments in which we hear dialogue that may seem to be almost background noise until we realize that what we have just heard is actually the wisdom of the ages. The prime example of this is when a fellow logger (played masterfully by William H. Macy) talks about the sadness of cutting down trees that are five hundred years old. He goes on to speak of the connectedness of the trees and the land and live itself.

The film connects well to Eastern philosophical thought, such as Buddhism or Taoism. I would suggest that it also has an affinity (whether the filmmakers recognize it or not) with the concept of panentheism, i.e., that everything is in God.

We will find that we find connectedness as well. Most of us live lives that may not leave a great footprint. But perhaps it’s not about leaving footprints. Rather it is about discovering that there is beauty in the mere fact that we are here now.