“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 cavernous tunnel, didn’t lose its contrasts on my home TV. A second viewing, this time in a proper theatre, proved more captivating still: here, at last, was a screen capacious enough to withstand the radiance of a golden-pink sunset and the faces of Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones. This is craftsmanship of an undeniably majestic order, and it has a way of both dropping your jaw and raising an eyebrow; you begin to wonder, at a certain point, if the film’s visual splendor has begun to outstrip its meaning. How exquisite is too exquisite?

If that seems an ungenerous response, it arises, I think, from the comparatively thorny, tough-minded spirit of the film’s source material: a 2011 novella of the same name, by Denis Johnson, who held the world’s beauty and its ugliness in more persuasive balance. The movie, like the novella, consists of moments from the life of Robert Grainier (Edgerton), a thoughtful, taciturn soul. He is orphaned as a young boy, sometime in the late nineteenth century, and spends much of his life in and around Bonners Ferry, Idaho; he dies, in 1968, in equally profound solitude. The eighty-odd years in between, though, are not untouched by love and companionship. Grainier falls for Gladys Olding (Jones), a churchgoing woman, as sparky and forthright as he is quiet and withdrawn. They marry, build a riverside cabin, and are soon raising an adorable baby daughter, Katie. But Grainier is a timberman, and his work forces him to leave his family for long stretches at a time. Sometimes he heads west, toward the Pacific; once, he ventures as far east as Montana. Where there are trees to be felled, lumber to be moved, and bridges and train tracks to be built, Grainier is there.

We learn much of this from an unseen narrator (voiced, superbly, by Will Patton), who maintains the same wry, semidetached tone whether he’s describing the odd comedy of Grainier’s life—or, in time, its defining tragedy. The narrator speaks bluntly but tenderly of Grainier’s irreducible ordinariness: he is one of countless men who, with no better prospects or singular passions to speak of, leave homes and families to undertake work of great danger, meagre pay, and, in the long run, monumental significance. The razing of forests and the construction of railroads—the unceasing industrialization of America, stretching across two world wars and touching the dawn of the space age—will reshape the very landscape of the country. But what mark will the individual laborers themselves leave? Not much, the film suggests. No wonder that when some of them die on the job, their boots are nailed into the trunks of trees, as a solemn act of remembrance: these men existed.

For Grainier, though, an unmourned death leaves an even deeper impression. One summer day in 1917, he tries to intervene—but ultimately can only watch, in helpless horror—when three white men rough up a Chinese railroad worker, Fu Sheng (Alfred Hsing) and hurl him off a trestle bridge, to his death. No reason for the killing is given, and the sheer inhuman senselessness of it won’t leave Grainier alone. For years afterward, he will be haunted by Fu’s reproachful ghost, silently castigating him for not doing more. On first viewing, something about the film’s treatment of Fu nagged at me, for reasons that I understood only after I read the novella, which takes a rather more complicated and, I think, more honest view of the circumstances. In Johnson’s original version, “the Chinaman,” as he’s called, stands accused of theft, and he ultimately escapes his captors. More pointedly, Johnson’s Grainier, far from being either an innocent bystander or a well-meaning protester, actively participates in the attempted execution. In the film, he defends Fu, asking, “What’s he done?” In the novella, he seizes the accused by the legs and cries out, “I’ve got the bastard, and I’m your man!”

Being something of an anti-originalist when it comes to adaptations, I wouldn’t suggest that Bentley and his co-screenwriter, Greg Kwedar, owe their source any strict fidelity. (The two men are frequent collaborators; they also wrote “Sing Sing,” which Kwedar directed, and “Jockey,” directed by Bentley.) Nonetheless, every change inevitably reveals something of the adapter’s intent, and what this particular departure betrays, I think, is a curious lack of faith in the audience—as if we could only sympathize with a morally unblemished protagonist, even one already imbued with Edgerton’s ineffable salt-of-the-earthiness and melancholy gravitas. As for Fu, he is little more than a pawn, a victim, and a spectral guilt trip; he dies and then returns, with no voice of his own, for the sake of Robert’s spiritual betterment. No one would expect this movie to encompass, or center, the history of indignities and sufferings endured by the Chinese laborers who helped build this country. But the filmmakers’ highly selective sampling of that history raises questions that “Train Dreams,” possessed of a kind of tunnel vision by design, has neither the ability nor the inclination to answer.

In a recent essay for Vulture, the critic Roxana Hadadi laid out a compelling argument in favor of Bentley and Kwedar’s liberties in adaptation, noting that they subtly transformed the film into a story “about the corrosive impact of passivity and inertia.” Passivity is certainly one of Grainier’s defining traits; resignation is another, and it is arguably what costs him a happy future with his family. When Gladys proposes that she and Katie accompany him on his work trips, he shoots down the suggestion, claiming that it’s too dangerous for them—an idea that will seem all the more bitterly ironic, in light of the dangers that, as we shall see, can surface at home.

For much of the film, though, Grainier is a quiet observer of other people’s tragedies. An early scene revisits a key memory from childhood, when more than a hundred Chinese families are deported from his town. Patton’s narrator tells us that “Grainier was baffled by the casualness of the violence.” Some time later, the young Grainier stumbles upon, and tentatively assists, an unnamed, gravely wounded man (Clifton Collins, Jr.) lying in the woods—an unpleasant incident, the narrator tells us, that he will push away from his mind in the years to come. In this instance, though, the film effectively uses Grainier’s psychology as cover for its own squeamishness. In the novella, the injured man confesses to raping and impregnating a twelve-year-old girl—a detail that has been airbrushed away here, in another morally sanitizing touch.

“Train Dreams” is thus something of a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of caution—and a movie that is ultimately tripped up by its own circumspection. But even its lapses and dodges have the effect of only strengthening my admiration for Edgerton, whose grizzled magnetism has seldom been more affecting. In scene after scene, Grainier plays the hushed foil to a more demonstrative scene partner, and in each instance he finds the drama in a stricken gaze, a wan smile, and, infrequently, a release of pent-up emotion. He forges perhaps his most meaningful friendship—and his most striking personality contrast—with Arn Peeples (William H. Macy), a dynamite expert who is, fittingly, an explosion of colorful chitchat. Peeples is one of the film’s designated folksy voices of conscience; around a campfire one night, he urges his fellow-lumbermen to consider the environmental implications of chopping down five-hundred-year-old trees en masse. “This world is intricately stitched together, boys,” he says. “Every thread we pull, we know not how it affects the design of things.”

Several years later, after leaving the logging business and settling down in his Idaho cabin for good, Grainier will cross paths with a U.S. Forest Service worker, Claire Thompson (a warm Kerry Condon), who is brought in to survey the region after a devastating wildfire. A fount of woodland wisdom, Thompson articulates her own version of Peeples’s sentiment: “In the forest, every least thing’s important,” she says. “It’s all threaded together, so you can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins.” These are stirring and inarguable sentiments, and they underscore that Bentley is working firmly under the spell of Terrence Malick, American cinema’s great extoller of the spiritual and material interconnectedness of all living things. The Malickian inflections are especially pronounced when we see Grainier at home with his family, holding his baby girl beside a river, or watching her interact with a flock of chickens. When a much older Grainier rides the Great Northern Railway to Spokane, Washington, he looks confounded by his encounter with paved streets and tall buildings—a sequence that reminded me of the views of downtown Houston in Malick’s “The Tree of Life” (2011), which convey a similar sense of alienation from urban civilization.

The glory of Malick’s cinema lies in its poetic expansiveness, its vast and seemingly boundless associative power. It’s no huge knock on “Train Dreams” to say that it feels like a compacted, simplified version of the real deal, or that it feels sturdily prosaic by comparison. The problem lies in the specific quality of the prose, which, for all its meticulous restraint, is also at unnecessary pains to spell out every last meaning. That’s especially true in a closing montage that juxtaposes moments from Grainier’s life with shots of him soaring over the landscape in a biplane, in a rare experience of a modern world that has long since passed him by. It’s a predigested catharsis, less revelatory than summative in its effect, and it suggests—much as the prison drama “Sing Sing” suggested, with its dramatically expedient view of life and art behind bars—that Bentley and Kwedar have, fundamentally, a carpenter’s approach to cinema. They offer the promise and pleasure of handcrafted art, but with every rough edge sanded down, every surface given a soulful coat of varnish. “Beautiful, ain’t it? Just beautiful,” Grainier murmurs toward the heavens. Yes, but only just. ♦