‘Train’ doesn’t stay on the rails – ‘13th’ traces path from slavery to US mass incarceration

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The unhappy, stained lives of New York suburbanites have long been a rich vein for writers like John Cheever, Richard Yates and Paula Fox. “The Girl on the Train” is the trashier, paperback version. Its old-school title may suggest Hitchcock or maybe Fincher (who himself is remaking Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train”). But Taylor’s film, disappointingly, is nowhere near the league of either. Instead, it’s closer to the kind of early ‘90s psychological thriller where bad things happen in slow motion and deadly instruments are drawn from kitchen drawers.

It’s adapted from Paula Hawkins’ popular London-set novel, the success of which was predicated on comparisons to Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl,” a trio of unreliable narrators, all women, and the way it cleverly untwisted female cliches of domestic life: the bitter divorcee (Rachel, played by Emily Blunt), the sexy ‘other woman’ (Megan, Haley Bennett) and the unwitting wife (Anna, Rebecca Ferguson).

They are each introduced in their own chapter, but our central figure is Blunt’s boozy, devastated Rachel, the so-dubbed “girl” who by all appearances is suspiciously like a woman. She spends her days riding the Metro North into and out of New York, cursing the suburban “baby factory”. From the tracks, she obsessively gazes at a house where she spies who she believes is the perfect, impossibly handsome couple (Bennett, Luke Evans). “I just know they know love,” she says.

Hints

From the train she sees hints of an affair or possibly a crime, and begins involving herself like Jimmy Stewart, on the rails instead of confined to a wheelchair. But the tale adds another layer — an incredulous one — to her voyeurism. As it happens, Rachel used to live a few houses down, where her ex-husband (Justin Theroux) now lives with his current wife (Ferguson) and baby.

The mystery kicks in when Megan goes missing — another girl, gone. Her character is set up as a kind of slinky femme fatale, who (despite her million-dollar home) is working as a nanny for — you guessed it — Anna down the street. In scenes with her therapist (a woefully miscast Edgar Ramirez), she sounds like she’s plotting a getaway. “I just can’t be a wife anymore,” she says.

Through a fog, the blackout-plagued Rachel believes she knows something about the case. She, herself, is a suspect because of her frequent creeping around her old home and continuous phone calls to her ex. On the night in question, Rachel wakes up mysteriously bloody. (Allison Janney makes a fine cameo as a police detective.)

Blunt can’t quite pull off the famously difficult task of believably playing drunk; her slurred words and blotchy face are overdone. But it’s her steely presence that gives “The Girl on the Train” the veneer of a film better than it is. Ferguson, too, is a class above.

But Taylor (“The Help”) isn’t able to believably blend the overlapping perspectives and “The Girl on the Train” comes across as a flat, predictable puzzle whose characters flip from one extreme to another.

Dangerous fantasies of marital bliss are at the heart of “The Girl on the Train.” There’s something worthy beneath the pulpy, preposterous plot that wants to give redemption to some old female stereotypes. But Taylor’s film merely shifts awkwardly from one trop to another, like an uncertain passenger changing trains.

“The Girl on the Train,” a Universal Pictures release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for “violence, sexual content, language and nudity.” Running time: 105 minutes. Two stars out of four.

It has been 150 years since slavery was officially abolished in the United States, but documentary “13th” argues that it is still alive in the form of mass incarceration that disproportionately affects black people.

Using TV footage, music, and interviews with academics, politicians and former prisoners, director Ava DuVernay portrays African-Americans as remaining enslaved, dating back to lynchings, the battle for civil rights, imprisonments for drug offenses, stop and frisk laws, and the current spate of police killings of unarmed black civilians.

The US prison population rose from 357,000 in 1970 to 2.3 million in 2014, the documentary notes. While black men account for some 6.6 percent of the US population, they currently make up 40.2 percent of the prison population.

Population

DuVernay, best known for directing the 2014 civil rights feature film “Selma,” grew up in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Compton, the birthplace of West Coast rap music.

“The community I grew up in, we don’t think of safety when we see the police … So it’s always been on my mind, and as I was an African-American studies major at UCLA, I was able to put that experience into a historical and cultural context and it really solidified my deep, deep interest in the space and this issue. I always knew I would make a film about it,” she said.

The documentary owes its title to the 13th amendment to the US Constitution, which ended slavery in 1865. It finishes with videos of the deaths at police hands of black men Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Philando Castile and others over the past three years that have given rise to the Black Lives Matter protest movement

“The film deconstructs the 13th amendment, breaks down all of the repercussions, the echoes of that amendment throughout history to the present day,” said DuVernay.

The documentary received a standing ovation at the New York Film Festival last week and has a rare 100 percent positive rating on review aggregator Rottentomatoes.com.

It makes its debut on streaming platform Netflix on Friday, and DuVernay hopes it will serve as a call to action.

“You now can’t say, ‘gosh, I didn’t know that, that’s horrible.’ Now you know, so what do you do about it? Do you ask your politician about it, do you push for answers? (Agencies)

“Now it’s out in the world and we’ll see what happens,” she said. (Agencies)

 By Jake Coyle

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