I find myself on entertainment news sites quite frequently. IMDB is one of the first apps I look at on my phone regularly. I'm very aware of movies being greenlit and produced and release dates and books coming out and music on the rise... I keep track of it all. For some reason, and I can't explain how, The Girl on the Train escaped all of my radars. I'm talking I had never heard of the book that apparently "shocked the entire world". I didn't know there was an adaptation of said book being filmed. I didn't know any of this existed until I saw the first trailer. So, having no prior knowledge and learning that The Girl on the Train sold the most copies of any book in the shortest amount of time... made me think I might want to read it. It's always better to read the book BEFORE the movie rather than after because the book is better and you get to create these characters in your head before watching the movie when other people do that for you. The book was a quick, yet thrilling and addicting Gone Girl-esque read. I finished it over three sessions. Afterwards, I was very intrigued to see the film. However, just like most cases, the film is not as good as the book. And it's not as good as Gone Girl. It just kind of... is.
Emily Blunt plays Rachel, a broken, alcoholic who takes the train to and from New York City every day pretending to have a job. She watches a couple every day out the window of the train and creates this fantasy of them as the perfect couple (Haley Bennett & Luke Evans). They live a few houses down from where Rachel used to live with her ex-husband, Tom (Justin Theroux). He has since left Rachel, married Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), and had a baby with her. Rachel traverses the tracks daily sipping vodka from her water bottle and making the worst decisions anyone like her can make. She calls Tom constantly, sends drunk videos to Anna, visits their house shit-faced, and once even broke in to hold the baby. She's a real mess. On Friday, Rachel is passing the house of her favorite couple and spots Megan, one half of the "perfect" two, kissing a different man. This sends Rachel on a downward drinking spiral because it perfectly echoes her own husband's betrayal. She blacks out, wakes up with scratches and bruises, covered in blood, with no memory of the night's events, and learns that Megan is missing. The rest of the movie is the intertwining lives of Rachel trying to remember the night, Anna trying to keep Rachel away, and the actual story of who Megan is living with her "perfect" husband Scott.
The book was written in subsections of three different points of view. We were given the perspectives of Rachel, Megan, and Anna. This is how the chapters were split. The reason this works is that each narrator provides the audience with a different perspective on an event. However, these are three of the most unreliable narrators known to man. The way that Gone Girl got its rocks off on basically telling the first half of the story, only to find out the narrator was lying the entire time and everything you accepted to be true was a big, fat hoax. This is that kind of fun. Every reveal in the book comes from someone else calling another person out on a hole in their story. There are so many reveals on tiny little lies that the twists keep coming fast and furious. The problem with doing this in a movie is that we don't really have three narrators and instead of the characters providing the false-happenings, it's the camera that has to do the lying. This makes the reveals feel almost cheap in a way. Not all of the reveals feel this way, but a lot of them do.
The movie itself isn't bad, it's just probably not what you're expecting it to be if you haven't read the book. It's not a heart-racing, fast-paced, thriller that keeps your blood pumping throughout. It's actually more like a Lifetime movie with much better actors. In fact, the story comes off so melodramatic within the movie, if you replaced everyone in the cast with C-list actors, it would fit right in on Lifetime. Everyone is lying to everyone and betraying everyone, but not in a creepy, tense way. It's more like an over-dramatic soap opera way... which isn't the way that it came off, at least to me, in the book.
If you DID read the book, then be prepared for some serious liberties taken on behalf of the writer and director. There are a lot of changes in the movie. Some of them don't change the story that much and a few of them even improve upon the book. But, a lot of them urked me in a few places. There is a scene with Rachel when she's captured by someone and locked in a room, fearing for her life. This scene gave the reader, in the book, a thrill as you're wondering if this person is the one who had something to do with Megan's disappearance. You're trying to piece this person to the clues in your head. In the movie, it's downplayed significantly. This person gets a little upset and throws a beer bottle at a wall. That's it. Then, there's the actual "oh shit" moment reveal... which in the book is a literal out-loud "oh shit" moment. The moment in the movie replaces the good "oh shit" moment for a different one revealed by a character played by Lisa Kudrow (whose character isn't even in the book). It's this moment the audience realizes whodunnit in kind of an anti-climactic sort of way. Following this scene is the actual "oh shit" scene from the book and even that felt like it could've been played a lot bigger for the audience who has been jerked around the entire movie trying to solve the mystery.
I felt like, for the most part, the acting was solid. Emily Blunt nails the character of Rachel. You're used to loving Blunt's tough roles and watching her own the screen. This character is the opposite of what we're used to. She's the literal definition of a mess. She makes the wrong decisions in nearly every scene and you cringe every time she does something worse. It's a fantastic performance. Theroux and Ferguson are very good as well serving as Rachel's ex and his new wife, Anna. Anna is a complete shrew that takes the cake for bitchiest character, but it's hard to know if she's actually like this because the only perspectives we get are hers and Rachels... and they hate the shit out of each other. Haley Bennett does a solid job as Megan, too. She plays the new 'trophy wife' with such fake happiness and disdain behind her eyes that her motivations in the film are really the only ones that the audience can truly understand... and she's a nut too. The only one who I didn't care for was Luke Evans. He's a hollow actor that brought zero life the role of Scott. I don't recall having seen him in anything else, but he was the weakest link in this tale.
I'm not entirely if the movie is that exciting to those who haven't read the book. There are a scenes that make very little sense because the explanations for the actions aren't in the movie, but in the book. Then again, it could be some pretentious reader in me just thinking I'm above everyone because I actually read every now and then. Who knows. But, it's not Gone Girl. The book very much had the essence of Gone Girl, but the movie does not. It sort of trudges along, holding on by the grasp of the quality of the acting and really not the quality of the filmmaking. It's pulpy, it tries to be a bit erotic (very awkwardly), and it's a mystery that you'll probably figure out... but it's entertaining. I'll give it that.
C+
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