The Girl on the Train veers off track
The Girl on the Train’s film version is faithful to novel’s plot, but can’t replicate its page-turning drama
Movies are not books, though you will pay dearly for dropping either in the bathtub. They are, however, both mass-market entertainments, and can thus be judged effective or not. The Girl on the Train, the bestselling 2015 novel by British author Paula Hawkins, is. The Girl on the Train, as adapted for the screen, (alas) is not.
It’s not a dreadful adaptation, and fans of the book — an estimated 11 million copies have been sold worldwide — will no doubt appreciate its fidelity to the source material. The biggest change is that Rachel, the overweight, unreliable alcoholic main character, is personified by Emily Blunt. Even with chapped lips and bloodshot contact lenses, she still looks like Emily Blunt on an off day. Have you seen her in Edge of Tomorrow?
Second-biggest change: The setting is no longer London but New York State, which had its own Brexit-type vote in 1775. So no great difference there.
The plot remains the same. Rachel takes the train into the city every day, to convince her roommate (Laura Prepon) that she is still employed there. On the commute she passes her former home, where her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux) now lives with his new wife Anna (Rebecca Ferguson) and their baby.
She also observes the neighbours, Megan and Scott (Haley Bennett, Luke Evans), who seem like the perfect-in-love couple — at least, until the day Rachel spots Megan kissing a strange man on the balcony.
This betrayal sends Rachel into a rage — one that plays out far less risibly on the page, where you can get away with words like “risibly.” On the screen, her alcohol-fuelled anger is portrayed by a mélange of choppy editing and unfocused images, a technique that suggests Michael Bay’s Transformers movies might be no more than a drunken dream in the mind of Shia LaBeouf and/or Mark Wahlberg.
The next thing we know, Megan has vanished, and Rachel is insinuating herself into Scott’s life to let him know that an affair preceded his wife’s departure. She neglects to add that she might also be the reason for said disappearance.
Allison Janney as a no-nonsense police detective (has she ever played a yes-nonsense character?) warns Rachel to stay out of things. So do Scott, Anna and Tom, but if she listened to them we’d have a much shorter, less interesting movie. Much better that Rachel start investigating Dr. Abdic (Edgar Ramírez), Megan’s shrink.
Hawkins’ novel plays its cards close to its chest. The screenplay, by Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary, Chloe), can’t manage the same feat, with the result that even those new to the story will have figured out most of its surprises by the two-thirds mark of the 112-minute film: 74 minutes and 40 seconds if you’re counting.
And all the herrings, red in the novel, are blue-shifted, the way herrings are when coming at you at high speed.
The result is a mostly bloodless thriller, one in which the reproductive subtext — Anna has a baby, Rachel couldn’t have one, Megan has one in her past, Scott wants one, etc. — plays out as nothing more than an interesting coincidence. Much of this falls at the feet of director Tate Taylor, who managed drama in 2011’s The Help, but can’t quite step up to the rigours of Gone Girl-type melodrama.
But no matter. The film will surely further swell sales of the book, which can only be a good thing.
It will give people something decent to read while they wait for the next great movie thriller to come along.