Worst (hic!) murder witness ever
You ’ d probably go out of your way to avoid Emily Blunt’s bleary, boozed-out, puffyfaced, red- nosed character if you saw her at a cocktail party or on a subway platform, but you’re not apt to forget her performance. In The Girl on the Train, Blunt really manages to suck all the charm and romance out of playing drunk that cinema has worked so hard to instill all these years.
Fun drunk? Nowhere in sight. Cute drunk? Not gonna happen. Red-eyed, with broken corpuscles lighting up her nose like Boris Yeltsin? Ding ding ding!
Blunt plays Rachel, a sad woman with smeared mascara who takes a commuter train in and out of New York City every day, gazing into the picture-perfect houses along the way and dreaming about how happy they are as she chugs her sippy cup of vodka. We quickly learn why she’s so wretched and unhappy — ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux) has not only married the “other woman” who broke up her marriage, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), they’ve managed to have the adorable kid that Rachel failed to have with Tom.
So Rachel sits on a train and sips, lurching drunkenly toward the camera in Tate Taylor’s intrusive directing style whenever she manages to get up and walk around, and pretty much looking like a cold, stringy mess. She develops a fixation on one “perfect” couple who lives a few doors down from her old house on the commuter line — a young blonde woman named Megan Hipwell (Haley Bennett, last seen sporting a rifle in
Magnificent Seven) and her husband Scott (Luke Evans). They canoodle and cuddle on the back porch deck and Rachel thinks they’ve got it made.
Then Rachel sees Megan with another man, Megan goes missing, and all kinds of things start to go blank.
The Girl on the Train wants very much to be this year’s Gone Girl (hey, it even has “girl” in the title, for a start) but sadly, it lacks David Fincher’s touch behind the camera. For another, the novel (by Paula Hawkins) is a downbeat thriller from a literary genre that’s been very popular lately: the “I don’t remember s**t” genre. We’ve seen it played out with Nicole Kidman’s turn as a braininjured woman in Before I Go To Sleep, also based on a woman’s novel about a forgetful narrator. Onscreen, there’s 50
First Dates, about an amnesiac woman who gets re-wooed every day by Adam Sandler; then there are the male frat-boy versions ( Hangover I, II and III) and the recent HBO crime series, The Night Of with Riz Ahmed on trial for a murder he can’t remember. Forgetting stuff is a pretty useful plot development.
While unreliable witnesses are pretty common in mysteries, blackout drunk witnesses, not so much. In The Girl on the
Train, Blunt plays Rachel as just about the least likely person you’d want to put up on a witness stand, ever. Though she stops short of slurring her words, her appearance is so textbook “progressive alcoholic” that you really want to steer her towards an AA meeting, stat. Along with her shambling, tattered look (call it Commuter Hobo Chic), Blunt adopts a persona that elicits pity, if not outright disgust, among other passengers.
We understand why Blunt would shoot for acting gold by playing straightup ugly — it worked for Charlize Theron in Monster, after all. (It even worked when Theron played an ugly drunk in Young
Adult.) It worked for Kidman and her prosthetic nose in The Hours. But Blunt is in a trap of the script’s making, which is that she can’t elicit too much sympathy, because this is a mystery, so we don’t know her ultimate part in it until the very end. So all those wonderful redemptive qualities that we look for in a beautiful actress playing ugly have to be kept in check. So instead we get the lurching Rachel, the Rachel with the bursting blood vessels and red-rimmed eyes, the Rachel with smeared makeup and lank unwashed hair. Eww.
Blunt needn’t have bothered to go to all the trouble, because Hollywood is unlikely to remember this wannabe zeitgeist thriller come Oscar time. What we viewers will remember is how unpleasant most of the women characters are onscreen. They’re either stealing people’s husbands or boinking their therapists without a care or just plain dead-eyed mean, like Allison Janney’s hardnosed Detective Riley. Viewers might also remember what douches most of the men are, and how violent, and how that violence expresses itself toward women. Like female voters assessing the possibility of Donald Trump in office, Academy Award voters might just say no.
There are plot points, too, to make you think Rachel is pure cray-cray. She has a habit of wandering off the train at the station near her old home and sort of wandering through the brush until she finds her old address. Sometimes she snatches her ex-hubby’s baby, just to cuddle. Most neighborhood crime watches would have had her picked up long ago. Like Blunt’s heroine, The Girl on the Train gradually loses focus, and becomes a blur of misdirections and red herrings.
It perhaps seemed like Oscar-worthy material to Blunt, who’s had a good streak with her dead-on FBI agent role in Sicario, and her dead-on tough soldier in Edge of
Tomorrow with Tom Cruise. She no doubt thought she was ready to do the heavy lifting in playing an unpleasant character in a thankless role. Unfortunately, she is surrounded by an unpleasant movie that makes no room whatsoever for sunshine or happy thoughts or any of life’s lighter moments. In the words of Jimmy Page, there’s no light and shade. It is, though, a twisted journey, and it is bat-s**t crazy enough to be enjoyable if you’re in the right mood. Perhaps bring a sippy cup along.