Girls on and off trains

In at attempt to keep this blog from going too quiet for too long (as it had for most of 2016), I'm planning on writing shorter reviews and comments. Let's see how it goes. I read Paula Hawkins' Girl on the Train and found it to be a good, if not great, thriller in the Gone Girl mold of narrative trickery--multiple viewpoints, fractured chronology, weirdly evasive moments when the author is trying to keep information from us without making it too obvious that she is. The story of an alcoholic mess of a woman who gets tangled up not only with her ex-husband and his new wife but also with the disappearance (and possible death) of a young woman who had been the ex's nanny works fairly on the page, but it doesn't quite translate well to the screen.

The voices and overlapping storylines that flowed well on the page feel jerky and artificial on screen. Emily Blunt (pictured) does the best she can with the unpleasant title character, but the other two important women (Haley Bennett and Rebecca Ferguson) seem interchangable--it's a plot point that the two have similar looks but neither one developed a strong individual character to care about. The men (Justin Theroux, Luke Evans and Edgar Ramirez) are more strongly drawn but their internal lives remain blank--partly because we're supposed to kept guessing about which of them, if any, is a killer. They could have been better written characters and still not given away the game. It's an ugly looking movie as well. The one thing about the film I thought was interesting was how often the train of the title is seen and heard in the background. Otherwise, this is a so-so thriller that I wish was creepier.