train dreams

The film recounts the 80 years of the life of Robert Grainier around Bonners Ferry, Idaho. Arriving in the area on the Great Northern Railway as an orphaned child, Robert drops out of school and spends his younger years without direction or purpose, until he meets Gladys Olding.

No, neither the film nor Johnson's novella is based on a true story, though they speak to the experience of real men and women living in the early 20th century

The novella details the life of Robert Grainier, an American railroad laborer, who lives a life of hermitage until he marries and has a daughter, only to lose both wife and child in a forest fire, and sink into isolation again. The novella won an O. Henry Award in 2003. It also won the 2002 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction.

Train Dreams is a lyrical film—a movie concerned more with emotional impact, nostalgia, and powerful imagery than rigid plotting. It is the kind of cinema