- Content: “Beautiful and Poignant But Sprinkled with Misguided Modern Bigotry”
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What You Need To Know:
Viewers will care deeply about Robert. Joel Edgerton does a superb job as Robert. TRAIN DREAMS also has some great insights about grief. The cinematography, acting and story are fascinating. However, TRAIN DREAMS has several bigoted and woke anti-Christian and anti-white European moments. In one of the sequences, for example, a Christian worker who constantly cites the Bible turns out to be a racist murderer. There’s also an implied sex scene between Robert and his wife. So, MOVIEGUIDE® recommends extreme caution.
Content:
Light moral worldview with some positive Christian content where man goes to church to court his wife who’s in the choir, but negated by strong politically correct anti-Christian and anti-European revisionist history where a Christian logger who constantly talks about the Bible, but turns out to be a racist when a black man shoots the Bible character because the Bible character killed his brother, plus another senseless racist scene when some white members of the crew building the railroad throw a Chinese man off a high railroad trestle, the hero sees the Chinese man in his dreams quite often, and some humanism where the grieving hero doesn’t turn to God;
Four obscenities;
Man thrown off high train trestle, men hit by falling timber, one man spits blood after being hit, animals hit by falling timber, deer or elk shot and it’s said the men will skin it for food, man dreams of cracking daughter’s leg to put a stint on it, house burns down, man constantly dreams about his wife and daughter perishing;
Man and wife hug, enjoy being next to each other and one implied bedroom sex scene where wife is on top of husband;
Upper male nudity, man takes a bath in a river;
Man and wife drink wine;
No smoking or drugs; and,
Man has nightmares about working on the train track, working in logging, and his wife and daughter being burned in their cabin while he’s away.
More Detail:
Joel Edgerton plays Robert, a man who makes his living laying track for the Great Northern Railroad and logging. Joel does a great job and is being promoted for an Oscar.
The movie starts with a little boy version of Robert on the train alone going West because his parents died, so he’s an orphan. At one point, an older version of Robert passes by a church and meets Gladys. He starts to attend church because she sings in the choir. Eventually, they build a small house on one acre near a river, and they have a baby daughter named Kate. However, Robert must leave them for long periods of time to earn money for his family.
One of these times on the railroad gang, some men take a Chinese person with whom Robert was talking and throw him off a high trestle. [This is highly unlikely, since the railroad companies usually worked the train people to death in the year 1917 when this scene occurs.]
In each one of his jobs logging or on train gangs, Robert meets various characters, one of whom is played by William Macey, who gives Robert a perspective toward the trees that gets him to question their logging work. Another character at another time constantly talks about the Bible, but eventually a black man calls the man out and shoots him twice dead because the man shot the black man’s brother.
One day Robert returns home and sees a tremendous forest fire. He runs to find his home completely burned and his family is gone. He hopes they escaped the fire, but, as the years pass, it becomes clear they died and aren’t coming back to him.
Viewers will care deeply about Robert. TRAIN DREAMS also has some great insights about grief. The cinematography, acting and story are fascinating. However, the movie has several anti-Christian and anti-white European moments that are deeply annoying. There’s also an implied sex scene between Robert and his wife.
Considering the violence in TRAIN DREAMS, MOVIEGUIDE® recommends extreme caution. This is a movie we would love to love, if it hadn’t had moments of revisionist bigotry. Logging gets a bad rap that doesn’t fit the facts.
TRAIN DREAMS will start streaming on Netflix two weeks after it opens in some theaters to qualify for awards.
