K-SCORE: 29
Director: Tate Taylor
Based on: The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
Writer: Erin Cressida Wilson
Starring: Emily Blunt, Haley Bennett, Rebecca Ferguson, Justin Theroux, Allison Janney, Luke Evans, Edgar Ramirez, Lisa Kudrow, Laura Prepon
Spoiler Level: Major, if you can follow it
“unrealistic depiction of trains”
The Girl on the Train, the novel, got itself on the most important reading list out there. Women’s. The notion that this content is what half the population is looking for, frightens me. It presents a world where suburbanites have no friends, no jobs, lots of money, lots of affairs, and are all sleeping with and/or killing each other if they’re not too busy crying about who they just found out slept with whomever. Or too busy dying. It’s a world with particularly untalented police officers handling two types of crime with equal incompetence: homicide and the drunken rumors of the emotionally unstable. It’s a story told in so many flashbacks that many of them had their own flashbacks and one vital one was experienced in the mind of one woman about the story of another. The depiction of women is that they’re highly likely to be irresponsible, deadbeat, weak-willed, lying, cheating, maniacs with tendencies to sob through everything. Men come off much much worse.
“With the help of Crazy Woman, Crazy Woman pieces together that Crazy Woman was pregnant before she got murdered.”
Here’s a little plot summary as I understand it. A woman named Rachel takes a train to Manhattan every day and spies on a housewife who lives in one particular house sort of near the tracks. For simplicity sake, I’ll refer to Rachel as Crazy Woman from now on. The spied on girl is named Megan. She’s the nanny of Crazy Woman’s ex husband. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll call her Crazy Woman. The ex husband, Tom, is married to a crazy woman named Anna, who shall henceforth be called Crazy Woman, for simplicity. Crazy Woman has a drinking problem that started before she separated from her husband, but their relationship ended when she found out he was having an affair with Crazy Woman. Crazy Woman was also jealous because she couldn’t have a baby due to fertility problems and yet Crazy Woman was very fertile and cranked out a baby right quick. Crazy Woman wanted a baby so badly that at one point she broke into Crazy Woman’s house just to hold her baby. Speaking of baby problems, Crazy Woman once drowned a baby of hers in a bathtub. The present day conflict involves the disappearance of Crazy Woman. Crazy Woman thinks she knows it wasn’t Crazy Woman’s husband, Scott, because she saw Crazy Woman before she went missing with another man, therapist Kamal Abdic, a Spaniard, perhaps. So Crazy Woman goes to see Scott because the police think she had something to do with it because she happened to get off the train on the day Crazy Woman went missing because she thought she saw Crazy Woman, but she was drunk and it was dark and it might have been Crazy Woman, and then afterward Crazy Woman woke up with blood on her head and couldn’t remember anything. Things start to come back to Crazy Woman in convenient memory flashes as she digs deeper into the lives of Crazy Woman, and as the police find the body of Crazy Woman in the woods. Crazy Woman does a little digging of her own and finds out Tom was having an affair with Crazy Woman, so Crazy Woman really got around. With the help of Crazy Woman, Crazy Woman pieces together that Crazy Woman was pregnant before she got murdered. This detail is aided by Crazy Woman’s flashback of Crazy Woman, and where the story becomes a little fantastical. Turns out Crazy Woman told Tom she wanted to go to the woods, where it would be tough to find her corpse, after she told him he was the father. He bludgeoned her head with a rock. Crazy Woman tries to warn Crazy Woman and neither call the police when they confront Tom. He flings vodka in Crazy Woman’s face so she stabs him in the neck with a corkscrew, which Crazy Woman then drives deeper into his carotid. All end up okay. Except Crazy Woman and Tom of course, who are dead.
I thought the film would be smart enough to have the killer be Crazy Woman, and the twist would be that she, a cheater, was jealous of Crazy Woman cheating despite having cheated much to the dismay of Crazy Woman. But that would get in the way of the message that Tom sucks. If it were really clever, Crazy Woman, Crazy Woman, and Crazy Woman all could have been the same character, alluded to by the opening line of Crazy Woman’s, “People say I have a vivid imagination.” It certainly would explain the convenient connections in their lives.
My biggest problem with The Girl on the Train however, is its unrealistic depiction of trains. There aren’t girls on trains, drunk, attractive, or otherwise. It’s mostly schizophrenics from Newark, conductors that look like they were plucked from the 1850s, and people that smell so bad they need entire cars to themselves. You can’t see beautiful housewives having sex from the window of trains, regardless of how slutty they are, and you certainly can’t get to know people that live in residences viewable from the tracks. White people don’t buy houses next to train lines, and people with enough money to live without having to work don’t take trains. The only thing I thought was fair was that, yes, often trains do go slow enough that you can run backwards from within a car to get a better look at something the train just passed by. But no one does that because your seat is your only salvation and there’s nothing to look at except a miasma of tragedy associated with the presence and existence of passenger railroads.
My favorite character was Crazy Woman, followed closely by Kamal Abdic.
I was shocked at how much skin Jennifer Lawrence showed in The Girl on the Train. Imagine my surprise when I found out Jennifer Lawrence wasn't in The Girl on the Train.