Earlier this week I watched the Oscar-nominated 2025 film Train Dreams. I had no idea what we were in for, it’s a film I watched on the recommendation of my most cinephilic brother, but I really enjoyed it. While the choice to have a narrator driven film with little dialogue probably limits its overall impact somewhat, it accomplished a lot (and in under two hours, which I appreciate more and more these days).
Reading old books and watching films that take themselves seriously (some old and some new) is a reminder of how thoroughly irony has infected everything in our culture. One of the most remarkable things about Americans of the 50s and 60s (at least as depicted, and in my experience of elderly folks as well) is how seriously they take things. Seriously enough to get involved and do things that make communities work.
I recently played a gig at a luncheon for the local chapter of the National Federation of Music Clubs. (Basically groups of private music teachers who work together on things like competitions, scholarships, etc. organized by state and local chapter.) The amount of ceremony and ritual this involved was mind-blowing. Singing of hymns, reciting of pledges, the reading of a collect, bestowing honors and awards. Then I played about 30 minutes of music and we ate the worst salad I’ve ever had. The thing all these folks had in common was they were of my parents generation or older. It is unimaginable to me that people my age would organize in this way. There are lots of reason, but partly because we just don’t take ourselves that seriously.
I haven’t checked, but one imagines the enrollments in things like Kiwanis, Rotary, Elks, and other fraternal organizations is declining rapidly as the Greatest Generation has all but gone and the youngest Silent and oldest Boomers begin to die away in large numbers.
Robert Grainier, the subject of Trains Dreams, takes his life and his work seriously. His profession as a logger is incredibly dangerous and must be taken seriously to survive. Even the most careful must be lucky enough to avoid accidents to make it to old age. But he also has a sense that the work, something he seems to have fallen into as a young man, is important in a significant way. More specifically, it is destructive. The loggers are small crews of misfits living for weeks in the deep wilderness, but the most aware of them sense they are changing the world as they sever the interconnected threads of the forest one by one. Robert and some of the oldest members of the crews—like one of his only friends, Arne, the powder monkey—understand that the world is changing and they are foot soldiers on the wrong side of the battle.
As he gets older he more frequently encounters the brashness of the younger loggers. They believe that there are so many trees that by the time they cut them all down the next forest will have grown up to replace it. Robert’s concerns are not just about sustainability though. As the opening monologue of the film tells us, there used to be another world you could find around a corner in the forest. An older, more magical world, that could be stumbled into. Something like Terebithia or Narnia, where the deep magic still rules. Even if the trees regrow they won’t be the same as the ones they cut. Robert understands that the world he was born into is quickly fading and a new world he understands little is taking its place. The young loggers, born just a few decades later, never found themselves in the old world and don’t fear its loss.
After a break of several years (for reasons I won’t spoil for those who have not watched), Robert returns to a logging job to find that the work has changed as well. A steam-powered tractor, replacing the horse-drawn skids, rumbles through the forest. Revving chainsaws rather than rhythmic axe work now reverberate around the jobsite. He struggles to start the machine (a problem over a century of small motor innovation has not solved) until a younger sawyer grabs it from him, pulls the choke, and cranks it up. Leaving him behind for good.
Though unsaid, Robert clearly understands that this change in technology means the forest, like himself, will not be able to keep up. He leaves logging forever and, in one of the most beautiful scenes of the film, baptizes himself into a new life in the clear cold river.
The ending years of his life are spent contemplating its beginning. A life which featured alternations of violence, joy, absence, and finally a great loss. His life parallels the life of the forest, a place of beauty, danger, and exploitation. How to make sense of all this he has seen? And especially in a world he hardly recognizes outside of his one acre homestead?
His work after logging consists of odd jobs until he comes to own a pair of horses and wagon. He then makes his living as a driver. One of the people he meets driving is a woman (who looks quite similar to his wife) who works as a forest ranger. Her job is to sit in a high observation tower watching for fires and reporting on the changing landscape of the virgin forests due to logging. Though it goes unsaid, his awkwardness at being part of this change is palpable. (Despite the narrator, this film is good at showing even if it tells a lot of things).
Joining her in the observation tower one day he sees for the first time how the forest looks from above. Its beauty is affecting, and this change in perspective finally allows him to voice the loss he has endured to her, seemingly for the first time. She has likewise suffered loss and finds solace in her isolated work, but she is able to empathize with Robert.
This singular experience of perspective and sympathy directs the end of his life toward searching and considering what his life has meant, what all these events good and bad have been about. He occasionally forays into the cities where he encounters electricity, television, and circus shows whose obvious fakery does not blunt their capacity to stir something in him.
These scenes in the city are important, because they show his seeming immunity to amusement. He encounters these new developments with the same seriousness he approaches everything. He tries to understand rather than escape from his reality in them.
One of his final interactions with technology is paying for a ride in an airplane to “see the world as only the birds see it.” In a clear visual reference to the similar scene from Malick’s Tree of Life, Robert has an experience, similar to the one on the forest watch tower, of gaining perspective on the overall events of his life.
Women are conspicuous throughout Grainier’s life. Though never knowing his father and mother—he is an orphan who was put on a train to the west—he is intensely devoted to his family. Meeting his wife Gladys, or rather being met by her, gives shape to his early life. The joyful intrusion of a daughter brings him meaning as more than a worker and provider. The forest ranger helps him process his grief, and the pilot (who is somewhat surprisingly a woman) shows him the meaning of his life from the air.
These relationships, while they exist, are his life. After they are gone he spends his time earnestly trying to understand them and the world he inhabits. His work does not consume him, in fact it eventually expels him. He has no interest in social life beyond his family, and his pleasures come only in their purest versions: eating, playing with his wife and child, experiencing nature.
Robert Grainier is a man utterly devoid of irony. He does nothing in jest, though he can be playful, and does not shrug off any of the roles he finds himself in. Most of all, he doesn’t hide himself behind a false self but lives his own life with seriousness and joy.
This was striking, because it is harder and harder to take yourself or your life seriously. The performative nature of life online, and increasingly our politics, media, and all other things, means we drape ourselves in irony to hide in plain sight. Too busy costuming a role to be who we are and live our own life in quiet and contemplation—a well-examined life lived well.