Movies

Review: A Period Drama About the Price of Progress in the American West

Train Dreams follows a logger in the Pacific Northwest during the age of westward expansion.

Katarina Hall | From the April 2026 issue

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(Black Bear and Kamala Films)

Train Dreams is a movie about a complicated truth: that life can be beautiful and cruel at the same time. Based on Denis Johnson's novella, it follows Robert Grainier, a logger in the Pacific Northwest during the age of westward expansion.

Grainier helps build the railroads, a job that ends up shaping his life. The trains represent progress—speed, connection, a modern world shaped by technology—but they also transform the land. Forests are cleared, landscapes change, and something old disappears as something new takes its place. Grainier's own life follows the same pattern: He builds a home and a family, and then watches much of what he loves disappear through fire, loss, and time.

The film never treats loss as a reason to reject change. Grainier himself finds moments of curiosity in what's new, riding a train to Spokane and marveling at how a quiet town turned into a modern city. Progress doesn't erase tragedy, but tragedy doesn't make progress meaningless.

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Katarina Hall is a staff editor at Reason.

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