COMMUTER WORTHY OF HITCHCOCK.
THE COMMUTER IS A TRAIN-BOUND THRILLER WORTHY OF HITCHCOCK
Every morning and every afternoon for a little over than three years I made the same steady commute from home to work and back — OC Transpo route 97, Bayshore to South Keys, 45 minutes each way. I could identify the riders with whom I shared that ride from a police lineup without hesitation, though I scarcely exchanged more than pleasantries with any of them and knew none of their names. In its peculiar way that bus became over time a community: two dozen strangers with little in common besides a destination and no better way of getting there, united for an hour and a half each day in the mundane interstice of travel by public transportation. We meant nothing to one another. And yet there seemed something between us, an implicit affinity. We commuted together: it seemed important.
Jaume Collet-Serra’s new film The Commuter channels beautifully this curious rapport. The hero of the picture, Michael McCauley, sells insurance at a firm in Manhattan, and with his wife and son, lives in the suburbs of upstate New York. Every morning his wife drops him off at the Tarrytown station, where he catches a commuter train on the Metro- North Hudson Valley Line into the city, and every early evening he makes the same trip in reverse. A nimble opening montage surveys a decade of this man’s unvarying routine: 6 a. m. news- radio alarm, hasty breakfast, chat and a kiss goodbye, then onto the usual carriage, dog- eared paperback cracked open, newspaper fanned out on the Formica table, a few friendly words for his fellow passengers. In 10 graceful minutes Collet-Serra has established the workaday pattern, true to both its monotony and dependable warmth.
Then, as they say, something extraordinary happens.
Collet- Serra, in the tradition of Hitchcock, tends to make reluctant heroes of unremarkable men, men with white-collar jobs and things on their mind: these men will be thrust into crisis, and they will be tested, beaten and strained. In Unknown, an academic in Berlin for a conference suffers a blow to the head in a car accident, and wakes to find his wife and his colleagues don’t recognize him, his identity seemingly erased. In Non Stop, a mor- ose air marshal on a red-eye from New York to London is embroiled in a plot to ruin the airline, and is framed to seem the primary suspect. Like Cary Grant in North By Northwest, Collet-Serra’s heroes are bewildered to find themselves in such sensational peril — in danger for their lives, asked to summon strength and courage they hardly knew they had.
In The Commuter, Collet-Serra invokes a more salient Hitchcock thriller: Strangers on a Train, that story of a man confronted with an opportunity to make his troubles disappear, for a price. In the Farley Granger role, as in so many of Collet-Serra’s films, is Liam Neeson, who brings to his struggling insurance salesman and family man great reserves of sympathy and dignity.
As the picture begins, McCauley is unceremoniously laid off without severance; he has, he laments to a friend at the pub soon after, no savings, three mortgages, and a son poised for college, the tuition cheque in the mail. So, we understand well the temptation when McCauley, on the commute home that evening, receives a strange proposition: if he can locate a particular passenger and fix them with a GPS tracker before the train reaches the end of the line, a fortune in cash will be his. What will happen to the target of his search the woman proposing this scheme doesn’t say. McCauley is sensible enough to know it can’t be good.
Thus we have the dilemma. McCauley wavers; he’s been offered the carrot, and soon those behind this conspiracy will show him the stick. The film becomes at this point a quiet mystery. Almost entirely without dialogue, Collet- Serra whisks his hero through the train, one carriage after another, as the would- be hero endeavours to root out the man or woman he has been told “doesn’t belong.”
Who are these people he has shared his commute with so many mornings and afternoons? The familiar faces seem suddenly different, and McCauley cycles through feelings of suspicion and mistrust. This scenario tests the man’s resolve and fortitude. It also tests the affinity of the passengers on the train. When the daily routine is violently interrupted, the man who has made this journey 5,000 times must rely on the rapport to be saved.
Collet- Serra’s films always proceed by escalation. He goes, needless to say, further in his pursuit of excitement t han Hitchcock was ever inclined to: close- quarters fisticuffs beget narrow escapes beneath the bowels of the train, holdups and shootouts began full- scale combat that tears a carriage apart. The second act concludes in a breathtaking fight scene, shot in long take, that culminates in McCauley’s head being smashed through a window, the camera peering outside with him as another train barrels toward the screen. As a dramatist, ColletSerra is interested in simplicity and economy — his concepts are simple, his plots streamlined, and he is known to pare scripts of excess until sparklingly concise. But as a director of action, he tends toward the spectacular. One can tell within minutes that at no point will Collet- Serra cut to anything happening outside the train. One can tell too that at some point that this train is coming off the rails.
In common with all of his films, The Commuter is playful ( a sight gag involving a real estate billboard earns a bellylaugh), serious ( there are emotional stakes, as well as post- recession social import), and above all earnest (it’s plain Collet-Serra really cares). The action exhilarates but never interferes with the merits that attracted the director to this material to begin with: the creative possibilities afforded him by the space, the celebration of human fraternity, the thrill of a moral quandary, the bond forged between men and women on a humdrum train.
This is the subject of The Commuter, ultimately, and prevails as the emotional throughline even when the guns erupt and the explosions flare. It’s a film about two dozen strangers with little in common besides a destination and no better way of getting there, united for an hour and a half each day in the mundane interstice of travel by public transportation — and in this case, for one trip, action and drama that elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary. It’s a marvellous film.