In 2025, two films reached the screen that confront the American myth of identity in radically different ways. Both are competing for the Academy Awards this year. One is quiet, meditative, almost biblical in its restraint. The other is loud, chaotic, propelled by fury. Train Dreams by Clint Bentley and One Battle After Another by Paul Thomas Anderson have become, almost unintentionally, mirrors of two Americas: one that seeks to understand its roots, and one that longs to burn them.
Train Dreams tells the story of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), an ordinary logger and railroad laborer at the turn of the twentieth century in the forests of Idaho. Orphaned as a child, Grainier builds tracks and bridges, marries, starts a family, and then loses everything in a fire. He goes on living in a solitary cabin among the trees, grows old, encounters wolves and the ghosts of memory, and finally boards a small airplane to look down upon his life from above. This is not a film about grand events. It is a film about a single man who became part of the frontier myth—and was ultimately absorbed by it.
One Battle After Another, by contrast, follows a burned-out leftist radical (Leonardo DiCaprio), a former member of a fictional 1970s terrorist group who, after decades in hiding, returns to the fight against what he perceives as a fascist state. Flannel shirt, beard, latte in hand, paranoia, a daughter, and a permanent state of revolutionary readiness. PTA’s film is a volatile blend of black comedy, action, and psychedelia, in which aging Weather Underground–style militants square off against ICE, Christian nationalism, and “white supremacy.”
The difference between these two films is not merely aesthetic. It is ontological.
One Battle After Another attempts to transplant a distinctly European leftist posture—permanent revolution, hatred of “the system,” the romanticization of armed resistance—onto American soil. The result borders on the grotesque: a revolutionary styled as a hipster lumbersexual who despises his own nation, sneers at “ordinary Americans,” and wages war in the name of abstract ideals that, in practice, amount to contempt for the very myth that shaped his country. It is a film of detached elites importing European anti-fascist radicalism and forcing it into an American frame, ending in caricature: flannel, latte, and hostility toward the flag.
Train Dreams emerges from an entirely different source—a deep, rooted affection for America. Grainier is no revolutionary. He is myth embodied: the logger clearing forests, the railroad builder, the pioneer who believed in progress. Yet that same progress destroys him. The film does not accuse. It does not shout. It shows the cost—racism toward Chinese laborers, fire, loneliness, mortality—but it does so with respect and melancholy. This is not an attack on the frontier myth. It is its hermeneutics. An interpretation born of love.
And that is precisely why Train Dreams becomes a great epic.
It speaks for the millions of Grainiers upon whom American identity was built—men who wrestled with nature, constructed a nation with their hands, and were eventually left alone on the platform as the train of progress moved on. The film reveals the paradox of the myth: man is both master and victim—active in felling the forest, powerless before death, time, and nature. Grainier does not revolt. He does not hate. He endures. In that endurance—in the solitude of the woods, in the flight above his own life—he discovers something that can only be called the sacredness of ordinary existence. It is reconciliation with fate—not capitulation, but mature acceptance. American in its purest form: introspection rather than destruction.
One Battle After Another offers the opposite: perpetual revolt that curdles into self-loathing. European leftism, dressed in American costume, produces a grotesque revolutionary who despises the nation from which he sprang. This is not reflection on identity. It is war against it.
In the collision between these two ways of confronting national narrative, everything becomes clear. One film looks at America with love and melancholy—even as it reveals its brutality and the fragility of its myths. The other looks with contempt and seeks rupture. One builds continuity: this was our life, and it was worth living. The other demands rupture: it was all a lie—burn it down.
Train Dreams prevails because it is truer. Not because it is apolitical, but because it is deeply American. It does not need to shout. The soft whistle of a train in the forest is enough—and a man who, at last, feels connected to everything.
This is a great story. Not about revolution. About endurance.
Margot ROUSSEAU
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