I give credit to director Tate Taylor (“The Help”) and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson for not only keeping this storytelling format from the novel, but for deftly handling it. Rarely are there movie adaptations that keep the original source material so close.
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Much has been made of whether Emily Blunt was the right actor to play the title character.
The Girl On The Train also stars Justin Theroux, Rebecca Ferguson, Allison Janney, Lisa Kudrow, Edgar Ramirez, and Laura Prepon. As for Taylor, occasionally he orchestrates photography, editing, and score into effective montage, but more often than not, murkiness trumps moodiness, with unsympathetic characters put through occasionally confusing paces, but nearly always granted intense close-ups as a short-cut to drama.
One day, on her way into the city, Rachel witnesses something so shocking in Megan and Scott’s backyard that it rocks her to the core. And Rachel fears she herself might have something to do with it. Rachel tells the authorities what she thinks she saw after learning Megan is missing. The Girl on the Train film follows the format of the novel by splitting the storyline between Rachel, Megan and Anna’s first-person perspectives; while it might have worked on the page, it’s overly complicated on the big screen, and causes the movie to move at a snail’s pace as it cuts back and forth between characters and timelines. I watched a lot of documentaries on alcoholism and addiction then I read books and I have a couple of friends who are recovering so I spoke to them a lot because it is one of the harder things to do, to act drunk. Blunt does that here as Rachel. She looks lost, ravaged by hopelessness, her voice thickening into syrup, her gait a confused stumble. Blunt is able to find great room to flex within all of Rachel’s layers. The Girl on the Train should have never left the station, and now its final destination is to be one of the biggest disappointments of 2016. It’s never easy to play a drunk convincingly; you can look to some United Kingdom soap operas for proof of that, but she manages to pull it off exceptionally well. Taylor creates a more heavy-handed and bleak atmosphere, where Hawkins simply wrote an entertaining whodunit.
It’s also the case that too numerous themes of this film – alcoholism, blackouts, marital-collapse, infertility, voyeurism – have been tackled frequently on the big screen, and short of bringing them all together into one film, this doesn’t really have much new to say about any of them.
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Unlike the thrillers that have passed the test of time, The Girl on the Train sadly will not be cherished for years to come. Taylor makes the mistake of treating a fast-moving story like Scripture; here we have another book adaptation that is more concerned with the audience for the book than the audience for the movie.
