Train Smoke And Dreams-The Film
Adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ “The Girl On The Train”-(2016)
DVD Review
By Sandy Salmon
The Girl On The Train, starring Emily
Blunt, Rebecca Ferguson, Haley Bennett, directed by Tate Taylor, from the
thriller novel by Paula Hawkins, 2016
A tale of three women, three smart up
and coming but troubled women, suburban women, suburban New York City women and
that makes a difference, is an interesting way to introduce this cinematic
thriller, Girl On The Train, adapted
for the screen from the best-selling novel by Paula Hawkins. Especially since
their lives, the lives of Rachael, Anna and Megan to give them names right at
the start, are intertwined one way or another by the same man, Tom, a man who
as one of the minor characters in the film stated rather succinctly if crudely
could not “keep his dick in his pants.” That statement, made on the suburban
commuter train from New York City, the train a symbolic metaphor for lots of
what goes down along the way, toward the end of the film goes a long way to
explaining why this well-done and suspenseful thriller ends the way it
does.
Here’s the scoop. Woman number one,
Rachel, played by Emily Blunt, smart, artistic but emotionally fragile and
unsure of herself, had as a result of her spiraling alcoholism brought on by
her failure to bear a child (and by the nefarious manipulations of philandering
Tom) been unceremoniously dumped by her philandering husband, Tom, for another
woman, woman number two, Anna, who had borne him a child. Rachel was a dreamer, a romantic, had some
almost child-like idea of what a leafy suburban perfect marriage might look
like despite her alcoholic haze which during her binges had left her with big
blank spaces in her memory, left her with blackouts. It is in trying to retrace
the steps of her life that will finally aid her-and get her and other into a
hell of a lot of trouble.
The romantic dreamer about some ideal
marriage part for Rachel came when she passed her old neighborhood on the train
she took every day supposedly going to and from work (she had been fired for
her over-the-top alcoholic behavior and had been fired so the trips back and
forth to New York City were trips to nowhere). A few houses from where she
lived she spied a couple who look like they were the consummate expression of
everything she still longed for-including reuniting with her husband.
Enter woman number three, Megan, played
by Haley Bennett, young, neurotic and sexually promiscuous, who was the woman
Rachel had seen from the train. Megan rather than the ideal suburban wife was
seeing a psychiatrist about her problems (while trying to seduce him). And
about the secret guilt she had felt ever since she had neglected her
out-of-wedlock baby when she was a teenager. Megan had worked for Tom and Anna,
who had her own set of emotional problems around having the child and having a
philandering husband, as a nanny to complete the scene (a job that it turned
out Tom had insisted she take).
Here is where things got dicey. Megan
one night went missing, and would be found after some time dead in the woods
along the nearby Hudson River, an obvious homicide. Rachel, in one of her less
lucid and less sober moments witnessed a scene from one end of a tunnel where
Megan, who had disillusioned Rachel from the train by apparently taking another
lover, and somebody had been seen together the night she disappeared. The rest
of the film unwinds around Rachel’s increased clarity and confidence in herself
about what had happened that night, who had killed Megan and why. Naturally
there is plenty of misdirection as in any good thriller. Rachel herself had
come under suspicion due to her erratic and at times near hysterical behavior.
As had, naturally given the statistics on such matters, Megan’s overbearing and
overwrought husband (with a little help from trying to be helpful Rachel).
Hell, even the shrink, Megan’s shrink, based on Rachel’s faulty foggy memory,
was under a cloud for a time. But as the film winds down and the possible
candidates with the motive to do the foul deed dwindle Rachel’s sense of what
happened that night and who might have committed the foul deed improved.
Although this film (and the book it is
based on) is predicated on solving the murder mystery which sets up the plot I
was struck by how much these three very different women had been thrown
together by an odd fate and reacted to things in very ways. The acting by the
trio, particularly Emily Blunt whose very complicated role drove the action but
also drove the psychological aspects of the film, was excellent as the three
women went through their respective paces. As for whodunit check it out for
yourself if you have not already read the book. A way better than average
thriller.
