The Girl on the Train, starring Emily Blunt, Haley Bennett, and Rebecca Ferguson released this last weekend to take the #1 spot in a competitive weekend, going against the topical, controversial The Birth of a Nation. The movie is based on the best-selling novel of the same name. The film has been marketed in a way reminiscent of David Fincher’s Gone Girl and is clearly influenced by it.
The story is about three women; Emily Blunt’s “Rachel,” Haley Bennett’s “Megan,” and Rebecca Ferguson’s “Anne.” To give too much of their character details would be to venture into spoiler territory, as this movie plays out like a series of unending reveals and red herrings. Their lives are revealed to more and more inter-connected as Megan goes missing, and Rachel finds herself in the middle of the mystery of what happened to her.
The acting in this film is superb. Blunt delivers yet another knockout performance and has come to be one my favorite working actors. Her top 10 list on Rotten Tomatoes could easily be read as a list of my favorite 10 films of the last 8 years. Haley Bennett, whose career is about to explode after starring in both this weekend’s and last weekend’s #1 film, Magnificent Seven. (Two very different roles that show her range, I might add.) Rebecca Ferguson is really strong here too, fresh off of a breakout in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, even if her accent slips a few times.
The film serves as a showcase for these talented female actors, but they are unfortunately forced to carry a weak story that is poorly told. The Girl on the Train is a thin mystery full of impossible consequences, overwrought dramatic elements, and unnecessary twists. There are also some really unfortunate directorial and editing choices. The passing of time or the change from a flashback to present-day is often imperceptible until halfway through a scene. And even more frustrating is the movie’s choice to show us false images to misdirect our predictions. One character who is suffering memory loss has flashes throughout the film of what happened, but many of these flashes turn out to be completely untrue, with little explanation as to how or why the character could or would imagine them in her regaining of memory. It is one thing to have an unreliable narrator – it is quite another to have an untrustworthy film.
The characterizations of each woman are endlessly interesting, and portrayed by Blunt, Bennett, and Ferguson so believably, but they all fall at the mercy of a story that devolves nearly into a Lifetime movie. It is especially troublesome because of how sexual, violent, and sexually violent this movie is. Since the movie itself drew upon Gone Girl for its tone and marketing, it’s only fair to compare them in this way. Fincher’s Gone Girl, and likewise The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, depicted sex and violence in arguably more graphic ways than The Girl on the Train. But Fincher’s films utilize those dark depictions towards a thematic end, using extreme examples to illustrate the faces we put on to have romantic relationships, or to show the deep roots of violence toward women.
The Girl on the Train seems to use sex and violence to fill theater seats, as very little of the dark and twisted moments on screen amount to much in terms of the story being told. The audience is forced to become nothing more than the crippled voyeur that Rachel begins the film as, which would be fascinating if it were the point the film was trying to make, and it might very well have been its intention. But instead, the film expounds too much energy on burying leads and obfuscating facts that it never ends up being about anything other than itself. And when a movie ventures into territory this dark, and calls on its performers to bare their bodies and souls in extremely vulnerable ways, it runs the risk of exploitation. The Girl on the Train walks this line very clumsily, and does little justice to the performers who give it far more than it deserves.
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