A hero and their team embark on a quest to win a prize or accomplish a mission. Sports movies, quests, and road trips are all the stuff of the Golden Fleece genre. The mission has a definable “road” and there should be a “prize” or “finish line” that the audience can track. But Golden Fleeces are always about something internal—a hero goes “on the road” in search of one thing and winds up discovering something else: themselves.

The 3 elements of a GOLDEN FLEECE story are:

1) A road spanning oceans, time—or across the street—so long as it demarcates growth. It often includes a “Road Apple” that stops the trip cold.
2) A team or a buddy the hero needs to be guided along the way. Usually, it’s those who represent the things the hero doesn’t have: skill, experience, or attitude.
3) A prize that’s sought and is something primal: going home, securing a treasure, or re-gaining a birthright.

Save the Cat! Beat Sheet Analysis for Train Dreams

Opening Image

From the POV of a train slowly passing through a dark tunnel into sunshine, we enter into a world of sky and field and stream as an unnamed narrator (Will Patton) tells us of searching for the great mystery, the foundation of all things. The entirety of Train Dreams was shot in natural light (!) and these Opening Images set the tone for a tale told in pictures and sensations.

Theme Stated

As Robert (Joel Edgerton) and Gladys (Felicity Jones) fall in love, she says, “Right now, I could just about understand everything there is.” Robert Grainier will go on an 80-year quest for the Golden Fleece primal prize of understanding life in general and his place in it, specifically. How he will achieve this, or not, in 90 minutes of screen time is a breathtaking testament to the power of a filmic story well told.

Set-Up

In his thesis world, Robert Grainier is a man with a lost past and a blank future. Orphaned and sent off to Bonners Ferry, Idaho, as a child, he dropped out of school and works on construction for railroads as a logger. Robert doesn’t strive for anything or ask many questions; he does his job and drifts with the seasons—things just are, or aren’t, and that’s all there is to it.

Even after meeting Gladys, Robert doesn’t go very deep; he does what a man in love should do, asks Gladys to marry him. When she says they’re already married, intimating it’s because of the way their spirits have united, Robert just chuckles. They build a cabin by the Moyie River and have a daughter, Kate.

Catalyst

In 1917, while away from home working for the Spokane International Railway, Robert witnesses a Chinese logger he’d been working with, Fu Sheng, (Alfred Hsing) thrown off a bridge by a group of white workers.

Debate

Horrified by the senseless killing and feeling a deep guilt for not intervening, Robert starts to ask questions that seemingly have no answer.

When the railroad executive congratulates the men for building the bridge that will save travelers 11 whole miles on their journeys, Robert cannot bring himself to celebrate, questioning the moral price of the construction. And rightly so, as the narrator informs us that soon enough a concrete and steel bridge will be built, rendering their wooden bridge obsolete.

Robert starts to have nightmares about Fu Sheng, unsettling dreams about fire and his childhood self being run down by a train. He hurries home to his wife and baby, reveling in their love, but troubled by his thoughts.

He wonders when Kate will know that he’s her daddy, and Gladys reassures him that there will be plenty of time for her to understand this concept, which of course, alerts any movie viewer worth their salt that something terrible is going to happen. Yep, buckle up, kids.

Break into Two

Robert gets back on the train for logging season, leaving his family behind.

B Story

Robert has a series of encounters that affect his journey: with his fellow loggers; his friend, Ignatius Jack (Nathaniel Arcand); and the forest services worker, Claire (Kerry Condon).

The number and transient nature of these B Story relationships underscore both the deep sadness of Robert’s aloneness and the strange beauty of a life made up of many small and seemingly insignificant parts that somehow add up to something meaningful.

Fun and Games

In his antithesis world with inner eyes now sharpened for detail and meaning, Robert starts to take note of the workers he’s traveling with.

There’s the old geezer who lives year-round in the trunk of a tree; the silent man who speaks only one sentence in two weeks, a rebuke for being asked an innocuous question; “Apostle Frank” (Paul Schneider) who preaches at exhausting length about the Bible until he’s mercifully quieted by a bullet from the gun of a Black man as retribution for Frank’s racist past deeds; and then, there’s Arn Peeples (William H. Macy).

Arn is an explosives whiz who has intermittent success with his dynamite but is an expert at avoiding any real work. He can spin a yarn, though, and play a mean harmonica, and Robert comes to appreciate Arn’s philosophies about life and its purpose. When three loggers are accidentally killed, Arn nails their boots to a tree so “they won’t just pass out of this world without nothing to show they was here.”

Robert starts to worry that Death is stalking too near to him and on his next visit home, he and Gladys try to figure out a way for their little family to stay together. Gladys offers to pack up Katie and travel with the loggers, but Robert knows that’s far too dangerous. They decide to take what little money they have and start a small sawmill once he’s back from his next stint in the woods.

Back out with the loggers, Robert is happy to see Arn Peeples again and share with him his plans for the future. But when Arn is hit by a falling tree branch and drifts away slowly into death over the next few days, Robert struggles to understand why his friend was taken and starts to feel that dread again, that something bad is coming for him as well.

Midpoint

In a heartbreaking false defeat, Robert returns home to find that a wildfire has torn through the outskirts of Bonners Ferry. His cabin has been burned to the ground and there is no sign of Gladys and Kate anywhere. A terrible time clock starts ticking. We wonder how long—or if—Robert will survive after such a tragedy.

Bad Guys Close In

Robert searches for weeks for his wife and child, finally returning to sleep on the remains of his home, waiting for them to return. He is tormented by his inner bad guys, seeing Fu Sheng everywhere, staring at him, accusing him.

When Ignatius Jack comes to check on him, Robert breaks down sobbing, admitting that Gladys and Kate are probably gone; the road apple has paralyzed our Hero in despair.

But the Golden Fleece still calls to him and in his deepest heart, Robert holds out hope for his family, rebuilding the cabin so that they will have a place to come home to. A red dog and her puppies take up residence with Robert and heal his heart just a bit, but still he waits. And waits.

For years.

Robert tries to return to logging, but he finds himself behind the times and not accepted by the rough young men and their electric saws. He goes back home and hires himself out as a carriage driver for the town, coming into contact with more people than he’d ever planned to.

One of them is Claire Thompson, who is working for the newly established U. S. Forest Service. She is a quirky, independent soul and we wonder if Robert could possibly find love a second time in life.

All Is Lost

Robert becomes very ill and in a feverish dream, he sees Gladys in their house as it starts to burn down, watches as she grabs Kate and runs out in the woods where she’s hit by falling debris and dies. And Robert can only observe, impotent and weeping, unable to do anything, unable to change a single element of the past.

Dark Night of the Soul

After he wakes, Robert packs up and goes out into the snow, traveling for days in the freezing cold, punishing himself for not being able to take care of his family.

Break into Three

Robert seeks out Claire and they go up into her lookout tower, staring out at the forest.

Finale

It has been so long since Robert has done anything except exist, it seems that even he doesn’t know what plan he will execute with Claire. He does confess to her what happened to his family and how he feels responsible for their deaths; Claire comforts him, then talks about her own loss, her husband dying of cancer just a year earlier. It is a sweet and tender bonding.

But just when we think that these two lost souls might find one another, Train Dreams throws a doozy of a high tower surprise at us: one night, Robert finds a wounded young woman lying outside his home and even though he knows it’s impossible, he wonders if it could be his little Kate all grown up and needing him. He takes the woman into the cabin for the night to watch over her, laughing and weeping with happiness, tending to her wounds, washing her face, finally able to take care of his beloved daughter.

But in the morning, the girl is gone. Was she real? Was she a dream? We will never know, but the experience drives Robert to execute the new plan: he will live in the cabin for the remainder of his days, sitting by the open window, just in case his Kate comes home.

Robert grows old in his home in the woods, but occasionally he travels by train into Spokane to wander the city. On one visit, he comes across a television in a store window and sees John Glenn in his historic space flight, orbiting the Earth as Robert watches in fascination.

Obviously inspired by this seemingly miraculous event, on a whim Robert decides to take a ride on an open cockpit biplane

Final Image

As the plane soars, Robert flashes on all the scenes of his life, all the people he’d known and loved, all the beauty, all the sadness. The narrator tells us of Robert’s death just a few years later, but “on that spring day, as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt, at last, connected to it all.”

Robert has completed the journey out of the dark tunnel of the Opening Image into a world above, a strange and abounding synthesis, indeed.