THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN: Train, Interrupted

Director: Tate Taylor
Writer: Erin Cressida Wilson
Cast: Emily Blunt, Rebecca Ferguson, Haley Bennett, Justin Theroux, Luke Evans, Edgar Ramirez, Laura Prepon, Allison Janney
Runtime: 112 mins.
2016

The Girl on the Train is a trashy thriller with higher aspirations. The film begins almost impressionistically, as we are exposed piecemeal to the mental landscape of Rachel (Emily Blunt), the closest thing we have to a protagonist. Her life in disarray after the implosion of her marriage, all she does anymore is drink and ride trains. One particular train, actually, the one that passes her old house where her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux) has a child with his new wife Anna (Rebecca Ferguson). Emily watches their lives unfold through panes of glass, just as she has become fascinated by the lives of their neighbors two doors down, Megan (Haley Bennett) and Scott (Edgar Ramirez). Once this tripartite dynamic has been established, an inciting incident occurs in a tunnel that neither we nor our protagonist are exactly clear on (her being in a drunken stupor when it played out). What happened in that tunnel and even who it involved are obscured to us, presented only in brief flashes. We merely know that something went down.

From there we're off to the races, as the stories of each of the three women are lugubriously fleshed out with liberal use of flashbacks and perspectival shift. The Girl on the Train is certainly a more formally bold thriller than it has any right to be, though one can guess that the somewhat crystalline structure of the truth surrounding these three women is a holdover from the novel by Paula Hawkins. It doesn't always pay off.


It's eminently clear that The Girl on the Train wants so badly to be the next Gone Girl and only manages to be a shabby imitation. That impressionistic establishing of the story I mentioned earlier works well for the first act, but when it persists for an hour and a half it loses its charm. The revelation of information surrounding these characters' relationships is stingy. Writers Wilson and Hawkins have built a decent mystery, and its descent into melodrama in the third act is at least eventful, but the mystique can only carry us so far. The pacing drags throughout the entire middle chunk, when nothing much seems to happen. Character interactions repeat without much to distinguish them, and they hardly progress the plot beyond reminding us that nobody is particularly trustworthy. Entire swathes of this movie could justifiably be cut, and it would have been a sleeker, more enjoyable experience. Gone Girl managed to earn every minute of its two and a half hour runtime. Meanwhile, there is no reason The Girl on the Train needs to approach two hours.

My other major issue with the storytelling is that the character motivations are all over the place. Not understanding why anyone is doing what they're doing is symptomatic of mysteries and melodrama to a certain extent, but The Girl on the Train crosses an obfuscatory line. The inscrutability of these characters does dovetail nicely with the themes about gaslighting and abusive relationships though, so I give its muddled characterizations a half pass.

The Girl on the Train is built around its thematic structure more than anything, and that's where it shines. These three women each represent one of the roles adult women fill in the world of men: the lover, the mother, and the ex-wife. At first it seems as if these characters are driven by their desire to please these men, but that's nothing more than a skillful feint meant to obscure their inner worlds. The film is ultimately about self-determination for women in a patriarchal structure that prevents it at every turn.

The rest of the movie is alright. The directing and cinematography are functional, with a few nice flourishes here and there. The soundtrack gets the job done, although, again, it's a pale imitator of the Gone Girl soundtrack, which is one of my absolute favorites. The acting is pretty good all around. Emily Blunt slays as usual. She's over-the-top messed up in a way that lets the audience buy into all the nonsense she does. Her instability carries the movie.

One of the things I admire most about The Girl on the Train is that Blunt's make-up artist, Kyra Panchenko, makes her appear truly haggard. Rachel convincingly looks like she's at the tail end of a years-long bender. I hate the "movie ugly" convention, when a character says, "You look terrible," or whatnot and the person actually looks gorgeous, with perhaps the vaguest hint of dark patches beneath their eyes. The Girl on the Train has the integrity to commit to the darkness of their protagonist's characterization and is commendable for that.

2 / 5  BLOBS