'The Girl On The Train' Is A Study Of Womanhood At Its Most Stereotypical

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN

The Girl On The Train is being marketed as the new Gone Girl, but, for the love of God, don’t buy it. David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn was a brilliantly-plotted, expertly-mounted portrait of human behaviour and theatrical manipulation, its story ricocheting back-and-forth, heading to genuinely-audacious places and unexpected cinematic heights. Tate Taylor’s adaptation of Paula Hawkins is, in contrast, a host of stock psychological-thriller tropes bumbling through a pat three acts, the waft of soap-opera growing ever-more pungent with each oh-God-they-didn’t revelation. It’s, essentially, a pulp page-turner turned slick, glib, silly melodrama: there’s more handwringing over scandalous adultery here than in a telenovela.

Emily Blunt plays a lonely woman in bourgie upstate New York, who rides the train, drunk, fantasising about the ‘perfect’ life of the couple — blonde Haley Bennett, shirtless Luke Evans — she watches out the window, in transit. She’s not just a figure of rampant projection, but a trademark unreliable narrator: in a device that a better-screenplay could’ve taken to fascinating places, she can’t remember much of her past due to persistent blackouts.

When Bennett goes missing — with no commentary on Missing White Woman syndrome — we’re left to wonder if Blunt, in some drunken haze, did her in. Only, we never really wonder it, as a film this generic isn’t really going to make its protagonist a drunken, murderous reprobate. Especially given most viewers — especially those aware of type-casting — will be able to spot the mystery’s killer an hour before the film comes to its overblown end. At said end, a character even says, aloud, that Blunt was “right about everything”, our unreliable narrator becoming the film’s vindicated heroine.

The Girl On The Train — despite its quasi-infantilising title — is a study of womanhood, at its most elemental and stereotypical. It’s a thriller built on conception anxieties: Blunt desperately wants a baby but is infertile; Ferguson once lost a baby and thus never wants another; and Rebecca Ferguson — the ‘other woman’ who’s shacked up with Blunt’s ex-husband, Justin Theroux — lives in fear of her child being stolen. Their maternal fears are only magnified by the standover abuse of Evans and Theroux, coiled vessels of masculinity that wish to cow women into submitting to their desires, be they carnal or reproductive; the ultimate insult for men, here, to be called impotent. Whilst Édgar Ramírez does get some non-violent-male screen-time in as the world’s sexiest psychiatrist, the film essentially presents men as philanderers and threats; and women as jealous, insecure, obsessive, gaslit.

In the end, what’s impotent is Taylor’s filmmaking. Aside from his fondness for matching hackneyed tropes to visual clichés — every flashback, here, gets a ghosting effect and mock-grainy look —  the director fails to take the loaded themes and salacious script anywhere interesting. Judging something this artless, unambitious, and mediocre-to-the-core alongside a David Fincher film is essentially unfair, but The Girl On The Train — and those selling it to the world—  have openly invited the comparison.

And, with Gone Girl the bar that needs to be cleared, The Girl On The Train is a dispiriting — if sometimes ridiculous — failure. Those hoping for real thrills and incisive commentary on gender politics will be deeply dissatisfied. Instead, this is just a silly, dopey movie where clichés mount up until the bad guy dies at the end.

DEEPWATER HORIZON

Deepwater Horizon is a disaster-movie to the (Earth’s) core. It turns the offshore drilling-rig of its title — the site of the greatest man-made environmental disaster in history — into a Towering Inferno on the ocean. Its imposing man-made structure is a feat of engineering that’s a work of hubris: a towering phallic symbol set to go up in a ball of flames; mother nature a mistress no arrogant corporation can ever tame.

"It’s movie-makin’ magic on a scale both outlandish and weirdly practical."

For Peter Berg’s taut, swift, efficient take on the 2010 tumult — in which a oil blowout caught fire, the deep-sea rig going up in flames and sinking, oil gushing into the ocean for months thereafter — that feat of engineering was constructed a second time over. Deepwater Horizon was shot on a near-scale replica model built in a tank stuck in a carpark of a disused Louisiana amusement park. It’s movie-makin’ magic on a scale both outlandish and weirdly practical. Where super-hero films have devolved into weightless, soulless, surreal constructions/destructions of pixels, here Berg and Enrique Chediak get to shoot outdoors, in an approximation of a real location; there no need for CGI sleights-of-hand when you can send a helicopter hurtling towards a derrick, or show sunlight reflected on water.

Berg’s metier has long been to bring stylised verite to action, and here the film is slathered in oil, grease, dirt, sweat, spit. Mark Wahlberg gets a hero’s turn as the life-saving last-man-off-the-rig, but for the most part the actor’s movie-star swagger is put on hold. He’s just a guy at work, performing the mundane tasks of his job. Whilst John Malkovich gets a little theatrical with his Cajun-accented turn as the BP overseer who pushes the workers to cut corners, and Kurt Russell wears a wild handlebar moustache, this isn’t a film particularly concerned with actorly turns and memorable characterisation. Instead, the screenplay — by Matthew Sand and Matthew Michael Carnahan — busies itself with depicting a workplace.

On-the-job jargon and ball-busting banter bounces around a place those toiling there call “the well from hell”. If you’ve never heard the word cement pronounced “SEEEEE-ment” before, well, soon you hear it spoken that way endless times; the repetition coming with a key misstep in the proper jobsite procedure the screenplay demands we learn. The film is full of facts, numbers, and a kind of fetishry for machinery. Before Berg burns the whole thing down, we’re invited to appreciate the complexity and scale of what was built.

Being a disaster movie, there’s ill-omens of what’s to come: a magenta tie deemed bad luck; a bird-strike on a helicopter that (especially post-Sully) lingers uneasily; air bubbles rising from the ocean floor with the ominous dread of a malevolent spectre in a horror-film. The greatest moment of foreshadowed irony comes courtesy, though, of reality: on the day the fucking thing exploded, the crew of the Deepwater Horizon received BP’s highest safety award.

The corporate overlords — making decisions, from a distance, to maximise prophets — are Deepwater Horizon’s ready villains, but the film remains weirdly placid in the face of their culpability. No one could ever mistake this for a polemic, or a work of activist outrage. Instead, poor choices simply yield unexpected, catastrophic results: shit goes wrong, and it goes wrong fast. There’s a string of explosions, and then a race-against-time for those on board to escape with their lives. It’s an action-movie, in a way, but without any of the genre’s swagger, slick style, or self-congratulatory air; not to mention that there’s not a single gun-shot. It may’ve cost $150mil and involved the construction of one of the most elaborate sets in Hollywood history, but Deepwater Horizon ultimately plays as earnest, blue-collar entertainment.