“Train Dreams” Is Too Tidy to Go Off the Rails

“Train Dreams” is a beautiful movie, but I can’t say that I entirely trust its beauty. The director, Clint Bentley, and the cinematographer, Adolpho Veloso, have composed a studiedly rapturous hymn to the American wilderness—to the scenic glories of babbling brooks, wispy cloud formations, and trees soaring majestically heavenward. It’s an exaltation of the natural world, rendered with an almost supernatural intensity of light and color, and with a score, by Bryce Dessner, whose rippling chords seem to evoke the sounds of cascading water. Watching the movie earlier this year, via the Sundance Film Festival’s online-viewing platform, I marvelled at the clarity of Veloso’s images, with their sharp interplay of sunshine and shadows: a patch of emerald-green forest, glimpsed from inside a cave