“The Girl on the Train” is a preposterous movie but not an unenjoyable one. If that sounds like faint praise, well, it is and it isn’t. There’s always something to be said for an entertainment that sustains its nuttiness all the way to its twisty finish. This one may not make much sense, but — like a demented old film noir or a Shonda Rhimes show at its crazed best — “Girl” doesn’t falter in its absurdity or commitment to its own seriousness. It never winks. You may laugh (as the audience I saw it with did, on and off), but there’s genuine pleasure in that mirth.
It’s based on the 2015 book by the British author Paula Hawkins that vaulted to the top of the best-seller list with a mix of unreliable narration, suspicious characters, ugly emotions, freewheeling gender stereotypes and a slowly kinking mystery that becomes as perilous as the labyrinth at the Overlook Hotel. With a troika of dubious female narrators, the book isn’t an obvious choice for the big screen, partly because of its rotating first-person voices. One problem is how to get into those separate heads, which the director Tate Taylor has tried to solve with voice-overs and by piling on close-ups, creating a proximity approaching the dermatological.
Its loomingest head belongs to the hard-working Emily Blunt, who plays Rachel, the story’s hub. She was once married to Tom (Justin Theroux, trying out his smile), who’s now married to Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), with whom he has a baby. A hard drinker, Rachel chugs booze like water and weeps like a broken faucet. She’s a sloshy mess, or so we’re meant to believe from her alternating lightly or heavily smeared eyeliner, which functions as a kind of mood ring-Breathalyzer. She’s a masochist: She stares out of a commuter-train window at the house where she lived with Tom, and where he now lives with Anna and their child. Rachel is also a fantasist: She ogles another couple, dreaming about their lives.
Put another way, Rachel is a stand-in for us, the viewer, the voyeur who peers into other lives. Specifically, she’s a proxy for the consumer of a certain kind of glorious romantic fiction, in which beautiful women suffer magnificently. Hollywood used to excel at these kinds of stories, movies in which, say, Bette Davis or Ingrid Bergman suffered, endured and suffered some more before their teary, square-jawed, set-shouldered triumph. Those types of movies aren’t all that common in American cinema these days, partly because women and their stories aren’t. The sobs and drama nonetheless did keep flowing, first in daytime soap operas and later in nighttime soaps.
Rachel is a clever surrogate, especially because she doesn’t really appear that far gone. She may drink way too much, but, well, she looks like the lovely, spunky and very appealing Ms. Blunt, just with chapped lips, splotchy skin and raccoon eyes. Like almost every star in a mainstream vehicle who plays a problematic character, Ms. Blunt — her persona, filmography, likability, relatability — serves as a kind of assurance from the filmmakers to the viewers not to worry, that things will turn out all right. Her stardom is our light at the end of the dark tunnel, a flickering promise, which is one thing that hasn’t changed much since the days of old-studio female martyrdom.
You need a tough woman for that sort of job, and Ms. Blunt, who moves easily out of crinolines and into combat gear, holds this material together with fierce, unwavering conviction. Rachel’s fantasy duo turn out to be Megan (Haley Bennett) and Scott (Luke Evans), a married couple who tend to pose or rut whenever Rachel’s train conveniently passes by. Megan also likes to stand on her balcony, playing peekaboo with her robe and flashing her undies and tummy. Or at least that’s how Rachel sees Megan. That’s also how we see Megan, an outlook that’s meant to change as the points of view shift, diverge and unite. As always, much depends on who’s telling the story.
Mr. Taylor doesn’t so much juggle the movie’s various parts — including a fragmented timeline, a device that here is nothing but empty mannerism — as lob them at the screen. (Erin Cressida Wilson wrote the script.) When Megan disappears, Rachel turns detective, if one mildly hindered by her drinking and narratively convenient habit of blacking out, which means that she doesn’t always know what’s happened in her own life. Rachel goes through a crucible of agony, braving abuse, infertility, betrayal and ravages of the body and the mind. But she looks. And she learns, including about other women. That’s the moral of this story, the appealing, gleaming jewel in the trash.
“The Girl on the Train” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for extremely bad adult behavior. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.
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