THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN – Review

Photo Credit: DreamWorks Pictures. © Amblin Entertainment

The big screen adaptation of the bestselling THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN has been subject of considerable buzz, seeming to promise a GONE GIRL-like thriller. There are indeed some parallels to that earlier film adaptation of a bestselling thriller but maybe less than you might expect.

Like GONE GIRL, this story is part psychological thriller and part crime mystery. Also like that earlier film, as you get to know these characters, you discover they are not what they at first seemed, nor is the situation what is seems at first either. But anyone expecting a taut mystery will be disappointed. Instead, director Tate Taylor (THE HELP) delves into the characters’ inner make-up and complex relationships. While Tate does give the audience moments of heartbreak (and some psycho-sexual sparks as well) as we get glimpses into troubled lives, how it all links to the plot is not always clear.

The film is more a psychological exploration of its characters – at least until, like in a French movie, everything happens at the end.

Whatever the film’s shortcomings, it is not for lack of effort on the part of Emily Blunt, who brilliantly plays the central character Rachel, with a raw emotion and heartbreaking sincerity that lifts the film.

Rachel rides a train as she commutes to New York City, a daily ride that takes her past a particular neighborhood of nice suburban homes. Every day, she sits in the same car on the same side of the train and near the window, so she can watch this one couple on their back porch. In her voyeuristic obsession, Rachel daydreams a whole story for this couple, one of true love, while she sketches them in the notepad she carries with her. One day, Rachel sees something unexpected on the couple’s back porch, and shortly after, the woman goes missing.

It is an intriguing premise. Who has not indulged in a little people-watching on a routine commute, or even daydreamed. But this story takes what seems to start as an imaginative woman’s daydream and morphs it into both voyeurism and obsession.

Rachel is sure what she saw is a clue, but she is not the stable person she appears to be at first. Rachel has a tenuous grip on reality, fueled by her heavy drinking and frequent blackouts, someone prone to drunk-dialing her ex several times a day. Rachel imagines the couple living the perfect life she longs for, and her attachment to her fantasy and her growing belief in it are disturbing.

With a puffy, tear-streaked face, Blunt breaks our hearts as Rachel, stumbling self-destructively and piteously through her broken life, while indulging her fantasy about a couple she sees on her daily train commute. She has been living with her friend Cathy (Laura Prepon) since the divorce but instead of getting her life together, it is unraveling. In the book, Rachel is a chubby gone-to-seed character, even a creepy one, but Blunt’s performance makes her a more sympathetic character, although still clearly a mess.

Of course, the house Rachel watches is not really a random location. It is a few doors down from the home she once shared with her now ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux), where he still lives with his new wife Anna (Rebecca Ferguson) and their baby.

While Rachel is at the center of the plot, the whole film really focuses on three main female characters. Megan is the blonde-haired young woman Rachel watches We get to know her through sequences where she interacts with her husband Scott (Luke Evans) and especially with her psychiatrist Dr. Kamal Abdic (Edgar Ramirez). Likewise, we get to know Anna in scenes with her and Tom, sketching out their relationship, sometimes flashing back to when Tom was still married to Rachel.

The film starts out well enough but then seems drift. Near the beginning, the main three women in the story are introduced with titles for “chapters,” a device used in the novel, followed by a sequence in which we delve into their lives and psychological background. But the chapter device is quickly abandoned in favor of jumping back and forth in time, transitions again marked by titles, and jumping between the three characters’ story lines. The effect, intended or not, is to disorient the audience, as to what is going on and when.

The cast includes Allison Janney, who is almost unrecognizable as tough policewoman Detective Riley. Lisa Kudrow also appears in the film, as Rachel’s ex’s former boss Martha, in a couple of pivotal scenes, and Darren Goldstein plays a mysterious man on the train in a couple of other key scenes.

The acting is good throughout but things often seems off in this film. Tom’s new wife Anna is a blonde like her neighbor Megan, and the resemblance between the two is close enough that the audience may have trouble telling the characters apart early on. That may be intended to hint at a reason behind Rachel’s obsessive fantasy about Megan but it is not clear.

It is one of several sort of odd casting choices, another being casting Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramirez (HANDS OF STONE, THE LIBERATOR) as psychiatrist Dr. Kamal Abdic. Ramirez speaks with a Hispanic accent,yet the character he plays has a Bosnian name and seems to be Bosnian.

Much of what we learn about the characters is touching, even heartbreaking, but how it all connects to the main plot is not always clear. After developing as a drama with a languid pace, director Tate suddenly trades it for a more pulse-pounding thriller style, in which several things crystallize in rapid succession.

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN is an uneven drama, unfurled slowly until everything happens at the end. The film is a mixed-bag, and whether someone likes it or not might partly depend on whether they liked the novel. Either way, what THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN does offer is greatly elevated by a strong performance from Emily Blunt.

3 out of 5 stars

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN opens in St. Louis, Friday, October 7th