Train Dreams stakes a complex claim in the Pacific Northwest cinematic canon

As the film takes us through the breathtaking corners of the Pacific Northwest most films continue to overlook, from Spokane to Buckley, Metaline Falls, Snoqualmie, Tekoa, Colville, and more throughout Washington state, each of these locations provide the movie not just with a unique texture, but a new frame of reference. In every scene that grounds itself in a new place, all the historical pains that played out there come rising to the surface. At every turn, Train Dreams holds the idea of progress in the region in the early 20th century up to the light, pondering, for every supposed advancement, how much is being lost. As the long-turning gears of western expansion begin to grind to a halt and modernization looms, it’s in the Pacific Northwest where we see them intersect most acutely. Even as Robert makes a small life amidst the trees, death follows him everywhere.

This is felt in an opening shot where a massive tree crashing down into the tranquility of the forest proclaims a potent thesis statement: This region is being rebuilt through destruction. This is a place home to people like Arn (William H. Macy), who will talk about the beauty of the natural world that surrounds them, just as he blows it apart. Though none of the film’s characters can predict it (in fact, at least one assumes the exact opposite), by 1990, after more than a century of logging to build a railroad that would soon become obsolete, less than 13% of the Pacific Northwest’s old growth would remain. Without ever taking us out of the film’s moment in time, director Clint Bentley and his co-writer Greg Kwedar portend this future through the increasingly mechanized march of death chewing through the landscape. As the loggers cut into the trees, forever reshaping the world around them, we feel their bodies simultaneously breaking apart, worn down by the work. Where fire and the growth cycle of the forest is a natural occurrence, the trees that Robert cuts down with his fellow loggers is not. When they disrupt the balance of nature, it strikes back against them.

Aside from the environmental cost, Robert not only witnesses but is complicit in the racist murder of his fellow worker, Fu Sheng (Alfred Hsing), a Chinese laborer who is thrown off the top of the railroad they’ve been building. This project will be celebrated by the remaining workers, but it will haunt Robert for his entire life. He feels guilty for what happened, but he didn’t do anything to stop it either.

It’s a guilt baked into the foundations of the region. In 1885, around the same time that Train Dreams is set, the Chinese community of Tacoma, a small town in Washington not too different from the growing Spokane that Robert lives outside of, was forcibly expelled by a mob. Even when “order was restored,” it would be decades before the immigrant community could begin to recover. The modern Pacific Northwest wasn’t just built on timber, but on bodies.

As the laborers work their lonely jobs, the human cost of each laid rail put down and each felled tree is part of how the region becomes intertwined with the characters. This is most felt in a defining image that, as the film returns to it, takes on a greater melancholy. Following an accident where multiple loggers are killed, their coworkers hammer their boots to a tree so there is something to remember them by. It’s deep in the forest, away from the cut, so it should be undisturbed.

Years later, Robert finds those same boots, the tree now beginning to engulf them. And he finds them because he’s back on the job—they’re still cutting, and have finally reached what was meant to be a small sliver of a sacred space. Nothing is sacred for long. How quickly they tore through the trees, and how easily the memories of those lost were swallowed up by an industry that both provided livelihoods to the region just as it killed those who lived there. The destruction of nature and of those carrying out said destruction go hand-in-hand, this corner of the world becoming reshaped for a future that none of the characters will live to see. 

Rather than Train Dreams merely striving to make the Pacific Northwest into a character, it puts the workers in conversation with the place they’ve unknowingly built. As the region grows, the impact on Robert is immense, though he never fully comes to grips with it. In the final sequence, he wanders into Spokane with no idea of what is going on there. He’s confused by it and left adrift, looking up at the sky when he is told that a man has been sent to space. Much like how Meek’s Cutoff and First Cow concluded with haunting scenes about their characters being lost in their PNW worlds, Train Dreams ends with a figure whose time has run out with little to show for it. It’s a film just as critical to the small yet significant Pacific Northwest canon in cinema, confronting the urgent existential questions about its past horrors and its settlers’ complicity, which continue to haunt its forests to this day. Even when Robert takes to the sky via a plane, closing his eyes and letting himself go, it’s a moment of tentative tranquility after a film spent uncomfortably connected to the ground. Train Dreams uncovers the graves of those buried beneath the rubble, under all that it took to build this corner of the country. It misses neither the forest nor the trees.