THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN

          Based on the best-selling thriller by Paula Hawkins, which currently floods the bookstores, The Girl on the Train should command a ready-made audience. The book also employs a most cinematic structure, which should make it smoothly adaptable.  It uses multiple narrators and points of view, jumps backward and forward in time, and a unifying symbol, the commuter train that runs through all the action, unites the characters, and provides both symbol and basis for the central situation.  Even the transplantation from England to America presents no particular problems for the script.

          A depressed, alcoholic young woman named Rachel (Emily Blunt), who’s lost her job because of her drinking, still rides the train from Westchester to Manhattan every day, mostly because she doesn’t know what else to do with her sad life.  The train passes near her former house, where her ex-husband lives with his new wife and baby daughter, and by another, where she observes an attractive, loving couple, Megan (Haley Bennett) and Scott (Luke Evans).  Those people and their lives represent all that she has lost and cannot ever regain, an apparent happiness that she will never know.

          Through flashbacks and cuts from one couple to another, as well as through Rachel’s point of view, the picture unfolds several stories, which frequently differ from Rachel’s interpretation of people and events.  Because of her often inebriated condition, her emotional fragility from her divorce, her fantasies about the perfect couple she sees every day, her confused memory, she becomes the perfect example of an unreliable narrator.  When Megan disappears, the police investigate and question Rachel about her vague reports of seeing the missing woman getting into a car during one of her periods of drunkenness; as her story grows more confusing she involves Scott, her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux), and his wife Anna (Rebecca Ferguson).

          As the various narrative threads and characters intertwine, a solution to the mystery begins to emerge and along with it, revelations of a truth that none of the characters previously understood.  The apparent reality dissolves under Rachel’s increasing comprehension of what actually happened and who abducted Megan.  Those revelations in effect solve the mystery but also suggest a kind of shared guilt—all of the people bear a painful burden from their respective pasts, which influences their actions and their plight and leads to the tragedy in the film.

          The multiple points of view maintain the sense of the difference between appearance and reality, and lend some energy to a regrettably uneven narrative pace.  The director, Tate Taylor, employs a great many tight close-ups of characters’ faces, a technique that may initially suit the style and content of the film, but gradually grows both visually and thematically overstated and rather wearying.  He also tends to repeat shots and scenes beyond a kind of necessary limit, so the movie often seems to be showing the same people and action over and over.

Beneath the surface of its mystery, The Girl on the Train ultimately fits right into the contemporary version of that old standby, the chick flick.  Beyond its focus on the major characters, the three connected women, it shows that the male characters are either inadequate weaklings or cruel betrayers.  Despite their victimization, the women essentially triumph, even in a final bloody act of violence, but the picture is honest enough to show that their victories create a certain ambiguity; nobody finally earns genuine happiness or even satisfaction, and several lives, if not ruined, have been drastically altered.  In a sense, the movie suggests that everyone hides some secret, that everyone is guilty of something.

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

            Based on Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, the original Magnificent Seven may be the first ensemble Western, employing a whole group of actors, some of them with distinguished careers, rather than a single dominant star.  The movie spawned three sequels and a television series and possibly influenced a couple of others with similar concepts of plot and character, most notably The Professionals and The Wild Bunch. 

The picture follows the simple plot of its predecessor, showing the gathering of a disparate group of gunfighters under the leadership of a special individual, in this case a bounty hunter named Sam Chisolm (Denzel Washington), to fight against an evil man oppressing a whole village full of innocent people.  The bad guy in question, Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard), terrorizes a small community to keep his gold mine poisoning the air and water, and employs an army of thugs to kill anyone who opposes him; in an early sequence that reveals his character and methods, he announces his takeover of the town, punctuating his speech by ordering his men to execute some of the people who protest.

One citizen, Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett) resolving to take revenge on Bogue and release her town from his grip, hires Chisolm for the job; as it turns out, he also has a serious score to settle with the tyrant.  He recruits six other men who then travel with him to help defend the town against Bogue and his men.  They defeat the deputies Bogue has installed to keep everyone in his thrall, train the inept citizens in marksmanship, free the apparently enslaved miners, and erect a series of defenses against the anticipated attack, which ultimately involves a whole army of Bogue’s thugs and a devastating Gatling gun.  The movie thus follows a predictable but reasonably entertaining pattern, and we all know that, despite the odds against them and the obstacles they face, the Seven will somehow prevail. 

The Magnificent Seven should also satisfy any student of the Western, that great American form, in its deployment of several of its obligatory devices.  Aside from all the gunplay, it features, for example, the poker game, the saloon fight, the whorehouse (dance hall in the old days, when those cowboys really loved to dance), the rite of passage from cowardice to courage in peaceful townspeople.  A couple of times the director, Antoine Fuqua, uses that familiar long panorama shot of a rider or group of riders traversing a vast and empty landscape, and now and then he employs the techniques of the spaghetti Westerns, with tight close-ups of faces, long silences, and an eye-level camera.

Its most problematic elements involve the actors themselves, the group who constitute that Magnificent Seven.  Aside from Denzel Washington, the movie lacks the kind of strong presences who command attention in the original—people like Ethan Hawke and someone named Chris Pratt simply cannot match Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Eli Wallach, and Charles Bronson.  Washington himself underplays throughout, sometimes almost whispering his lines; in one of a few anachronisms, he speaks of a “worst case scenario,” a phrase I doubt ever was uttered in 1879.

The generally awful Vincent D’Onofrio balances Washington, simply chewing up the prairie as the largest and loudest member of the Seven.  The only unusual addition comes in the form of a Chinese expert, Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee), who throws knives and darts, some of which he stores in his hair, with deadly accuracy.  Peter Sarsgaard plays the evil Bartholomew Bogue with a chillingly soft spoken delivery, making a little speech equating his savage actions with both democracy and Christianity (sound familiar?).  He commits a couple of actions that perfectly establish his character—when his tame sheriff brings him bad news, he simply shoots the messenger.  Worst of all, in the early sequence where he first appears, he sets fire to the church: holy smoke.