You  might think that a poignant film about a  seasonal logger, “Train Dreams,”  and a black comedy about a paper executive, “No Other Choice,”  have little in common, but they are different sides of forestry and about understanding of forests and the future. Both focus on a man, the breadwinner of a family, forced to do things to keep his family intact.

Train Dreams

After watching this film which is currently streaming on Netflix, I reflected on my late maternal aunt and my own circumstances. She had good friends that she traveled with until she was widowed. She still met them at church but by in the last years of her life, she was the lone survivor. For myself, after high school, I did have two good friends. Both have already died. You can have good friends and still end up alone.

Such is the case with the protagonist of “Train Dreams.” Based on Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella of the same name, the film follows Robert Grainier from his early days in Idaho to his death.

ADDENDUM

After reading the novella overnight, I wrote this essay: ‘Train Dreams”: Not all the Chinese Railroad Workers Were from China

Historical Background

The place is Bonners Ferry, which is currently has a population of 2,520.  The current demographics are 94% White, 0.2% African American, 2% Native American, 0.6% Asian and 4.7% Latino.

Grainier arrives in the area on the Great Northern Railway as an orphaned child.

The Great Northern Railway was created in 1889, created from several railroads. It would eventually stretch from Lake Superior (Duluth and Minneapolis/St. Paul) to Northern Idaho and then, to Washington State (Everett and Seattle).

With no family and little schooling he meanders through life until he meets and marries Gladys Olding. He builds a log cabin not far from town along the Moyie River.

In the summer of 1917, while working on the Spokane International Railroad Grainier sees a Chinese worker thrown off of a bridge by White workers for a reason that is never fully explained. That is after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and before the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924. And I had questions about this.

The Transcontinental Railroad was completed 10 May 1869 at Promontory Summit, Utah.  Not long after came the mob violence against the Chinese. During the Los Angeles Chinese Massacre of 1871, 19 people were murdered. On 6 November 1885, a mob burned down Chinese-owned businesses in Old Town Pasadena. Other California towns such as Truckee, Marysville, Red Bluff and Riverside expelled Chinese residents through boycotts and violence during the 1880s.

Also in 1885,  Tacoma, Washington forced the Chinese residents on to trains and sent them out without deaths and this was called “The Tacoma Method.” Eureka, California deported its Chinese population via steamship for “The Eureka Method. In Rock Springs, Wyoming, White minors were less considerate and murdered at least 28 Chinese workers, driving more out of the area.

Seattle forced out its Chinese residents in 1886.

In 1917, a  lone Chinese man was both brave and foolish, but I wasn’t sure about what was happening in Idaho.   In the context of the film, as someone who has been mistakenly called “Chinese” or “Chink” in contemporary US society, I have to wonder if the supposed Chinese worker is even really Chinese. The issue isn’t just anti-Chinese, but anti-East Asian. Looking into this, I found references to both the Japanese and the Chinese.

The Spokane International Railroad was chartered in 1887 and began operation in 1906. By 1930, the route was 164 miles, serving the states of Washington and Idaho.

According to the Idaho Statesman, the US Census for 1900 listed 53 Japanese railroad workers in Bonners Ferry. The Japanese were considered enough of a problem that:

The 1898 Legislature passed an anti-alien labor law forbidding the employment of aliens by corporations in the state of Idaho, aimed directly at Japanese railroad workers. In August 1899, the Mountain Home Bulletin reported that Pat M. Sullivan, section foreman of the Idaho Short Line at King Hill, had been arrested and charged with violating the law. “The trial resulted in a conviction, the offense being a misdemeanor. An appeal was filed and the case will be taken to the district court and the fight will be made on the constitutionality of the act. This is the first trial under the anti-alien law in this state, and it will be doubtless carried to the Idaho Supreme Court. The issue involved in this suit is important to the labor element, as it will decide whether or not American laborers can be displaced by Asiatic coolies or European contract slaves. The prompt manner in which the case has been handled shows that Elmore County has officers who are not swayed by corporate influence and do not falter in line of duty.”

The article further states:

The act was tested again in 1899 when several section foremen of crews working on the Great Northern Railway at Bonners Ferry were arrested for employing Japanese labor in violation of the anti-alien law. They were found guilty and fined $50 each, which was appealed to the Idaho Supreme Court on the grounds that the law was unconstitutional.

This is not to deny the legacy of the Chinese railway workers in Idaho. There is a Chinese memorial in Bliss: Five, possibly six Chinese workers who were killed while building the Oregon Short Line Railroad. The Union Pacific Railroad has maintained the site since 1883, so a year after the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Yet the exact circumstances of the deaths isn’t clear.

I found another reference to Chinese on a  Facebook post by the James J. Hill House (3 September 2022) records that:

…in 1892, a group of 48 Chinese men–all veteran railroad workers–sought work in a Great Northern Railway construction camp near Bonners Ferry, Idaho. The men were initially hired, but were soon threatened by a mob of several hundred white workers. Seeking to avoid violence, Great Northern foremen chartered a special train consisting of two boxcars and a caboose for the Chinese workers to make a quick exit.

The Film

There once was a passageway to the old world, strange trails, hidden paths. You’d turn a corner and suddenly find yourself face-to-face with the great mystery, the foundation of all things. And even though that old world is gone now, even though it’s been rolled up like a scroll and put somewhere, you can still feel the echo of it.

We see a tunnel. We see black leather boots, partially absorbed by a big tree in a peaceful forest. We see a tree being felled and men working on taking it apart. That’s where we meet Robert Grainer, who lived more than 80 years in Bonners Ferry. He never saw the ocean.

At six or seven he’s sent to Fry (In the novella, Grainer (b. 1886) arrives in Idaho in 1893 on the Great Northern Railway, Idaho (In the novella, Grainer (b. 1886) arrives in Idaho in 1893 on the Great Northern Railway and in 1899, the towns of Fry and Eatonville become Bonners Ferry.) where he sees things like a two-headed calf and the mass deportation of about 100 Chinese families.

Historically, the Chinese workers were already prohibited from working on the railroads as were the Japanese by the 1898 legislature. Most of the known expulsions of Chinese took place in the 1880s, before Grainier arrived in Fry/Bonners Ferry.

In the film, we never see the actual racial violence that drives the Chinese out. Grainier also  gives a dying man water in the forest without judgment. .

He (Joel Edgerton) married Gladys (Felicity Jones) when he is 31 (1917) and soon after have a daughter, Kate. To better support Gladys and Kate, he begins taking seasonal logging work.

In the film, while working on the Spokane National Railroad, he muses how these migrant workers become temporary families even though they might come from places as far as Chattanooga or Shanghai. We see him witness the solitary Chinese worker thrown off the Robinson Gorge bridge the summer of 1917. For a moment, he even helps the men, lifting up the Chinese man’s legs until the man kicks him off. Granier doesn’t get up again to help, but watches as the Chinese man is thrown down, screaming. The narrator tells us that “many years later, a bridge made of concrete and steel would be built ten miles upstream, rendering this one obsolete.” Granier will live long enough to ride a train and see that bridge, but before that he is haunted by the Chinese man, in visions.  Even as the other men celebrate the bridge’s completion, he sees the Chinese man.

According to Roxana Hadadi, writing for Vulture, the racist attitudes or “othering terms” used in the novella have been erased Grainier has been changed in the film.

Even when remembering a moment from his childhood when “a hundred or more Chinese families” were forcibly deported from town, Grainier again thinks of them in inhumane terms, the “strange people” and their families “jabbering like birds” as they load themselves into railroad cars while being held at gunpoint.

It’s an improvement, then, that Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar change Grainier from someone prone to judgment to someone prone to questioning.

In someways, Grainer’s migrant workers life echoes the lives of the Chinese journeymen. They often came to the US to earn money which they would send back to their hometowns and families with the intention of returning. Not all the Chinese workers returned. (This is different from the Japanese immigrants who meant to settle down in the US when they could.

Grainer does, of course,  return home and then go off again. During his time away, he also meets many men and sees people die. There’s that man who preferred silence. There’s the talkative Apostle Frank  (Paul Schneider) who talks about God and the Bible, but that doesn’t save him when a Black man, Elijah Brown (Brandon Lindsay),  comes to deliver a message to Sam Loving. In 1893, Gallup, NM, Frank/Sam shot the man’s brother, Martin Brown, just because of the color of his skin. No one rises to help Apostle Frank and no one says anything racist about the shooter. Yet aren’t we meant to consider why Fu Sheng was killed?

Some deaths are marked by boots nailed into a tree. One regular that he meets and befriends, is already very old, Arn Peeples (William H. Macy). Granier asks Peeples, “Do you think that the bad things that we do follow us through life?”  Peeples doesn’t know and has passed his life alone. Peeples  takes dangerous work, using explosives, but his death is an act of nature, not at all related to the nature of his task.

Just before Grainer and his wife can save up to form a business concern, in what was supposed to be his final season logging, he returns to find that his cabin and family have been consumed in a wildfire. He hopes they survived for there is no evidence of their deaths.

A friend, Ignatius Jack , helps comfort him and Granier rebuilds the cabin as if waiting for his wife and daughter to return. And while he attempts to return to logging, he finds that he has grown old. He has problems adjusting to the new technology and the different mindset of the younger men.

Eventually, he finds works close to home and some satisfaction in the woods where he feels the presence of his wife and daughter. He shares a sense of grief with another, the widowed Claire Thompson (Kerry Condon).  They both find comfort in the lush forest and its natural sounds.

Will Patton’s narration takes us in and out of Grainier’s life. There’s something comforting and non-confrontational about his voice and the scripting by Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar. Under the direction of Bentley, there is beauty in the moments where there is no dialogue and the score (music by Bryce Dessner)  carries the emotional weight instead coupled with the lyrical cinematography of Adolpho Veloso.

Sometimes people end up alone, not because they had no friends, but because they survived all others. Much is the case with Grainier. Yet the forests that he once cut down became his sanctuary, even as the world progressed, leaving his skills outdated and as his small piece of the world seemed almost immune to progress.

After watching this film, I thought of myself and the good friends that pre-deceased me. I thought of my aunt who survived her husband and their extensive friend group. I know she found some comfort in church until all of her fellow church friends were gone. I know she found comfort in the hummingbirds that visited her. The new televisions, the Internet and new technology confused my aunt and in time, perhaps, I will feel the same. But nature will remain and hopefully, therein, I will find comfort.

I do question whether changing the fate of the “Chinaman” and Grainier’s othering thought were the right thing to do, particularly since there’s another incident involving a minority. I’ll read the book and comment on that later, but why not portray how commonplace, how ordinary, how normalized the racism toward people of East Asian descent was? Should we contrast that with the Black man who comes and shoots one of the men dead?

• Train Dreams Is an Argument Against Complicity (24 November 2025). 
• ADDENDUM After reading the novella overnight, I wrote this essay: ‘Train Dreams”: Not all the Chinese Railroad Workers Were from China

In “Train Dreams,” Peeples warns that “The world is intricately stitched together,” and while he’s scolding the younger men, he’s also a man who has been alone and dies alone. When Grainier realizes another acquaintance of Peeple’s didn’t even know the man had died and Grainier faces technology he can’t understand that makes the work less team-oriented, he quits logging. Technology and foreign inclusion are also themes of  black comedy, “No Other Choice” and I recommend seeing the Korean film as a follow up.

“Train Dreams” had its world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and was released in theaters in November. It is currently streaming on Netflix.

ADDENDUM

After reading the novella overnight, I wrote this essay: ‘Train Dreams”: Not all the Chinese Railroad Workers Were from China