Over the years, we’ve seen Hollywood take a few different avenues when adapting pulpy, bestselling phenomenons. David Fincher has displayed a couple of different techniques, putting his chilly, authorial touch on “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo,” and embracing the camp of the high-wire story in “Gone Girl,” while Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books have been turned into a star vehicle for Tom Cruise. Which brings us to “The Girl On The Train,” based on the book by Paula Hawkins which has sold multi-millions, and has fallen into the hands of director Tate Taylor (“The Help,” “Get On Up”) and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson (“Secretary,” “Men, Women & Children”) who refuse to have fun with the genre elements, or offer much insight into its potential thematic subtext. For better or worse, the filmmakers play it completely straight, resulting in an effort that is nothing more (nor less) than an airplane movie that you’ll forget about when you arrive at your destination.
Life in the New York suburb of Ardsley-on-Hudson seems to be one where everyone is fabulously wealthy, profoundly bored, and prone to making bad decisions, if only to spice up their terribly comfortable and dull lives. Upper middle class malaise is a popular cinematic trope, but one that rarely feels shrewd. Here it unfolds with rather rote tedium, setting up a gallery of sub-Agatha Christie suspects in the eventual crime that sets the narrative in motion: the possessive Scott (Luke Evans) is married to Megan (Haley Bennett), who bitterly resents their neighborhood, and the clique of Stepford wives and mothers, which her husband would like her to join by having a child; so, naturally, Megan works part-time as a nanny for Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), caring for her baby Evie, a job she hates, while sharing her woes with therapist Dr. Kamal Abdic (Edgar Ramirez); and Anna’s husband Tom (Justin Theroux) used to be married to Rachel (Emily Blunt) aka the girl on the train, before leaving her for his current wife (and their former real estate agent).
Devastated by the breakup of her marriage, Rachel’s best friend has become the bottle, and every day she takes the train from the apartment she shares with her college pal Cathy (played by Laura Prepon and some extreme eyebrows) into the city. And every day, when the train slows by Ardsley-on-Hudson, she stares wistfully at Scott and Megan’s house, imagining the perfect life they lead just a couple doors down from where Rachel used to live with Tom, before everything fell apart. However, these longing looks have turned into an obsession, and when Rachel spies Megan potentially cheating on her husband, she unravels, and one night, drunkenly disembarks at Ardsley-on-Hudson and….wakes up later, caked in blood and bruises, and no memory of what happened. Even worse, Megan has gone missing, and the cops (led by Allison Janney’s Detective Riley, who should get her own procedural) aren’t far behind with serious questions.
Essentially, the riddle of the movie is uncovering what happened in the crucial hours Rachel blacked out, and since the cops hardly believe the words of a drunk who has already shown an unnatural attachment to her ex-husband by constantly calling him and even sneaking into his house to hold his baby, she has to prove her innocence. But of course, she muddies the waters even further by getting more involved with the other players than she should, with the light of suspicion shining strongly on her, but also spilling onto everyone else.
However, the middle act stretch will certainly test the patience of many. The filmmakers brush against a handful of styles and ideas, only to continually and frustratingly let them pass. The eroticism lurking beneath of “The Girl On The Train” never gets truly steamy, even with an R-rating, leaving one to wonder if Universal wasn’t flirting with a potential PG-13 version at some point. Meanwhile, the facade of upper class contentment, the shame and stigma of mental illness, and the suffocation of existential crisis are fleeting notions as the film steadily moves along to get to the good the part: the twist. And admittedly, it’s a pretty nice one, and rewards the wait through an uneven and sometimes uninteresting movie to get there. It’s the moment when Taylor finally decides to let loose, and he plays the big reveal and climatic moments with a sensationalism the rest of “The Girl On The Train” could’ve sorely used.
Keeping things on the right side of watchable are the performances, none of which are particularly revelatory, but all of them serving the territory their role in the story requires. Blunt and Bennett both rise above the pack, but even so, the screenplay doesn’t give them dimension until almost too late. And Danny Elfman’s score is also a pleasant surprise, showing hints of Cliff Martinez style iciness that serves the mostly po-faced proceedings well.
While Hawkins has rightly shot down glib comparisons between “Gone Girl” and “The Girl On The Train,” they are similar in one crucial way: the stories are ridiculous. However, Fincher displayed an awareness of author Gillian Flynn’s overly soapy and seamy tale (and benefitted from her writing the screenplay), turning it into a lunatic thrill ride, logic be damned, with just enough substance to give the potboiler some heft. However, there is no such joy to be found in “The Girl On The Train,” which leaves you wishing it had been a little more willing to go off the rails. [C]