Psyhco-dramatic take on Long Island desperate housewives.
The Girl on the Train
Grade: B
Director: Tate Taylor (The Help)
Screenplay: Erin Cressida Wilson (Men, Women & Children) from the Paula Hawkins novel
Cast: Emily Blunt (Sicario), Hayley Bennett (Equalizer)
Rating: R
Runtime: 112 min.
by John DeSando
“I would chance saying globally there is a feeling that female empowerment has, at last, become a topic that is fashionable, and more power to that.” Gwendoline Christie
I know now to avoid alcoholic women by seeing The Girl on the Train. Rachel (Emily Blunt) rides the Metro North between Ardsley-on-Hudson and Grand Central and what she sees when she is sober enough to think changes her life in serious ways. Although she is an unreliable point of view, most of us have lived long enough to be able to tell the good from the bad.
Or maybe not because as in Gone Girl, it is difficult many times to tell appearance from reality. While the three main ladies in this taut, complicated psychological thriller about the vanishing American Dream are attractive enough, even the two non-alcoholics are trouble because their sophisticated actions belie their screwed-up psyches.
Note my screw metaphor that doubles down to suggest the activity that endangers their lives and to support the corkscrew motif of drinking and Hitchcockian staircase, or more to the point, rear window. Oh, yes, the screw will help to make things understandable in the denouement.
The Girl on the Train has a successful pedigree with Paula Hawkins’s novel of the same name, and from what I gather is a reasonably faithful adaptation. I make it a policy not to read a novel before I review a film so I don’t get sucked into the unfair comparison between two very different art forms.
The film is strongest when it suggests that we cannot know for sure almost anything about our neighbors, especially if our connection is from a window or brief encounters on a sidewalk. The film also reliably reports on the blind spots in marriage, where the statement from The Crying Game and elsewhere applies, “Who knows the secrets of the human heart?”
The film is weakest as it weaves time and motives back and forth with dizzying uncertainty (despite title cards telling time) as if Rashoman were grafted to Inception. It is challenging enough to keep the women straight (blond as some are with similar features—a purposeful similarity). The men—easy enough—they’re marginally important to the emotional lives of the frustrated women.
No, it’s not a hardcore feminist tract, nor is it a Fatal Attraction knock-off. The Girl on the Train is a cautionary tale about the different powers of both men and women when dealing with the opposite sex. Perhaps if everyone acted like the slightly masculine Detective Riley (Allison Janney), the world would be safer but not as sexy.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
