The Girl On The Train is more off-peak saver than first class despite enough twists, turns and glamorous blondes to invite comparisons with Hitchcock
The Girl On The Train Cert: 15 1hr 52mins
Rating: 
Paula Hawkins’ best-selling thriller is primarily narrated by an alcoholic, and watching the film that has now been made of her book, I found that I too had drinking on my mind: had I had one too many to be able to follow what was going on?
My goodness, The Girl On The Train is complicated. One unreliable narrator I can cope with, but this has two; no, sorry, make that three.
But it also has two characters who look like each other – a Hitchcockian trope far more pronounced in the film than it is in the book – and a challenging chronology that bounces backwards and forwards in time depending on who is telling the story.
My goodness, The Girl On The Train is complicated. One unreliable narrator I can cope with, but this has three, and a challenging chronology that bounces backwards and forwards in time
I haven’t been so confused since watching Memento – Christopher Nolan’s brain-curdling thriller that unfolds backwards – with a bad hangover.
To some extent, this sort of mental fug is the great triumph of Erin Cressida Wilson’s faithfully adapted screenplay.
Yes, the action may have been moved from London to New York, with its commuter trains running up and down the semi-rural suburbia of the Hudson Valley, but, at its heart it is still the story of a hard-drinking and mentally fragile woman who is trying to piece together what she saw, or thinks she saw, from the window of her train, and then what happens when she gets off the train to investigate further.
If you haven’t read the book, you’re likely to come out of the cinema tied up in contrived-feeling knots. And the style employed for the film is florid and, occasionally, melodramatic
Rachel – played by Emily Blunt – wakes up bruised and covered in blood but can’t remember anything. She’s been drinking, of course.
Prior to the film’s release, the undeniably beautiful Blunt has received some undeserved flak for taking on this pivotal role.
Admittedly, she’s not bloated or overweight, as Rachel is described in the book, and it’s a mystery why the character has a British accent when the action has been moved to America.
But she shabbies down convincingly – a few blotches and bit of rouge here, a bruise or two there – and I certainly had no trouble in believing in her Rachel.
Fans of the novel will presumably be more forgiving. But there are so many unlikely links, and Rachel makes so many improbable interventions that I found it a difficult story to buy into
This is a woman, we must remember, who once turned heads; who – not many years earlier – won the heart of her now ex-husband, Tom.
And that’s exactly what Blunt looks like – a raddled and now dead-eyed former beauty.
But while I had no trouble believing that she had been married to Tom (Justin Theroux), it was a bit of a stretch – as it is in the book – to discover that Rachel’s train rumbles past the house where Tom now lives with his new wife Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), just a few doors down from the good-looking couple she so admires and fantasises about.
It’s only later that we discover that this is Megan (Haley Bennett) and Scott (Luke Evans), and we only discover it when Megan goes missing.
If you haven’t read the book, you’re likely to come out of the cinema tied up in contrived-feeling knots.
And the style employed for the film is rather florid and, occasionally, downright melodramatic.
At the screening I went to, it’s perhaps telling that the climax was met with widespread laughter, which may simply have been a release of tension but could also have been a sign that something that works (just about) on the page may be a step too far on the screen.
Fans of the novel will presumably be more forgiving. But there are so many unlikely links between the characters, and Rachel makes so many improbable interventions – her drunkenness always providing the perfect excuse – that I found it a difficult story to buy into.
With glamorous blondes and doubts about what’s been seen, comparisons with Hitchcock are inevitable and deserved – both Rear Window and Vertigo come to mind
It’s refreshing to find a film with three female leads, but you can’t help but notice that all three are victims of one sort or another, and that all three have flaws that render them, to varying degrees, unlikeable.
In other words, it’s a contrived and complex film with nobody to root for.
With glamorous blondes and doubts about what’s been seen, comparisons with Hitchcock are inevitable and deserved – both Rear Window and Vertigo come to mind.
But the film it most resembles is 2014’s Gone Girl, which took a shed-load of money at the box office and secured – perhaps surprisingly – an Oscar nomination for its British leading lady, Rosamund Pike.
I shan’t be a bit surprised if The Girl On The Train goes exactly the same way, although I’m inclined to think Emily Blunt more good here than great.
Which, as it happens, is pretty much what I think of the film too.
SECOND SCREEN
Blood Father (15)
Rating: 
War On Everyone (15)
Rating: 
My Scientology Movie (15)
Rating:
You may not be aware of it yet but 2016 has already been unofficially declared ‘the year of the great Mel Gibson comeback’.
Yes, ten years after his arrest for drunk driving and, more particularly, the career-wrecking anti-Semitic rant that followed, Gibson is back.
As a director, his Second World War drama Hacksaw Ridge (it should be released in this country later this year) has been winning rave reviews at film festivals, and now Blood Father gives him the chance to show what he can still do as an actor.
2016 has already been unofficially declared ‘the year of the great Mel Gibson comeback’, and in Blood Father he shows that in the right project he can still be very good indeed
Looking grizzled and, frankly, mad as hell, he begins with a wonderfully appropriate mea culpa, delivered in character, at an AA meeting. ‘I did a lot of damage, lost a lot of people along the way: some of them stayed lost… All I can do now is not drink.’
And with that duly out of the way, Gibson goes and shows that in the right project he can still be very good indeed.
Here, in a film that comes across as a trailer-trash version of Taken set in the Californian desert, he’s playing Link, an ex-con-turned-tattoo artist whose aims in life now are to stay clean, out of trouble and find the long-estranged daughter who ran away from her already broken home three years ago.
But the by-now 17-year-old Lydia (Erin Moriarty) finds him first – and she’s bringing a lot of trouble with her.
Jean-Francois Richet directs, but the real plaudits belong to writers Peter Craig and Andrea Berloff for their gritty but witty screenplay, and to Gibson and Moriarty, who spar well together. Welcome back, Mel.
War On Everyone is one of the great disappointments of the year with John Michael McDonagh oblivious to how many times this sort of ultra-violent comedy has been done before, and better
John Michael McDonagh’s War On Everyone has to go down as one of the great disappointments of the year given that his last film, Calvary, was a work of genius, and the one before that, The Guard, undeniably good.
But just like brother Martin, who went from the highs of In Bruges to the disappointing lows of Seven Psychopaths, McDonagh Sr has found the move to America a step too far.
With Alexander Skarsgard and Michael Pena playing the inevitably maverick, rule-breaking pair of cops, McDonagh seems oblivious to how many times this sort of ultra-black, ultra-violent comedy has been done before. And done better.
Yes, there are one or two nice lines and Pena, playing a closet intellectual whose wife quotes Simone de Beauvoir, has nothing to be ashamed of, but with line after line falling flat, this has to go down as a really bad day at the movie-making office.
Louis Theroux's My Scientology Movie gets better as it goes on thanks to his legendary patience and his success in persuading a number of former church members to spill the beans
I’m not the greatest fan of Louis Theroux’s documentary-making style, and 20 minutes into My Scientology Movie it looked as if he’d be letting me down again.
I mean, if you’re making so little progress with your investigation into the notoriously secretive Church of Scientology that you’re reduced to auditioning actors so that you can stage re-creations – and showing us footage of those auditions – that’s not the most encouraging sign.
But fair’s fair, things do get better, thanks to his legendary patience, his entertaining baiting of church members in their own lair, and his success in persuading a number of former church members to spill the beans, particularly about its reclusive and controversial leader, David Miscavige.
He is, however, very dependent on the testimony of one of them, the affable but volatile Marty Rathbun, who, every now and then, you suspect, may just be spinning Theroux a line.
