Bookshelf Battle

There’s a girl.  There’s a train.

That’s it. Goodnight everybody.

Oh ok, I’ll write a review.

SPOILER ALERT.  “The Spoiler on the Blog.”

BQB here with a review of The Girl on the Train.

Rachel (Emily Blunt) is a booze fiend. Big time alcoholic. Loves the sauce. Mmm…drinky drinks get in my belly.

Every day she rides a train that passes by the homes of two couples that she’s unable to stop thinking about.

One couple is Megan (Haley Bennett) and Scott (Luke Evans).  They appear to live an idyllic life as happy lovers and remind her of the marriage she lost due to her alcoholism.

Ironically, she’s so depressed that her boozing destroyed her marriage that she can’t stop drinking.

SIDENOTE: Haley remains a Jennifer Lawrence doppleganger and has absconded with yet another part from J-Law. First The Magnificent Seven, now this.  3.5 readers, if you look like J-Law, head to Hollywood, for there’s apparently a good living to be made as a J-Law double.

The other couple is Rachel’s ex-husband, Tom (Justin Theroux), now married and the father of a child with Anna (Rebecca Ferguson.)  It breaks her heart to have to constantly see the house she once co-owned inhabited by a woman that isn’t her and a baby that she wanted to have.

When Megan goes missing, everyone becomes a suspect and since Rachel is an alky/epic maker of bad decisions/person who constantly embarrasses herself with bad behavior, she’s not the most trustworthy protagonist for viewers to rely upon.

At times, it was confusing.  The action moves often from Rachel as main character to flashbacks of the other characters’ lives and scenes where Rachel isn’t involved.  Multiple perspectives.

At the end of the film, the lady sitting behind me in the theater loudly blurted out this wasn’t as good as the book.

Being a gentleman, I didn’t want to disparage her by informing her that she was at the top of my list of types of moviegoers I can’t stand – i.e. person who reads the book the movie is based on, then insists on being haled as a genius all throughout the movie.

Heck, for all I know, she could be right. I did buy the novel written by Paula Hawkins.  I did read the first few chapters. They seemed interesting. I just lacked the time to finish it.

Initially, I thought this was going to be a modern take on the 1954 film Rear Window with Jimmy Stewart – i.e. two people gawking out a window only to end up gawking at something that terrifies them.

That would have been cool but uh, well, not to give it away, but no, this isn’t that.

This movie is a win for Blunt.  She showed Oscar worthy greatness in last year’s snubbed Sicario and this year, she uglies herself up and becomes a pitiable but sympathetic character.

I mean, sure, not everyone goes into an alcoholic tailspin after a marriage, but who among us haven’t been left feeling gut punched by the ending of a relationship?  Blunt captures the epic sadness that comes from having to cope with the fact that your beloved is now with someone else vs. the cruel reality that the world is still turning, you still need to get up and go about your day, and the people around you only have so much sympathy so stop complaining and suck it down deep already.

I’m going to give it shelf-worthy status largely because I got to see Haley Bennett’s tucas, which arguably is the same as seeing J-Law’s tucas.

Or is it? I don’t know.  I haven’t seem them in a side-by-side comparison.  I only run a modest blog for 3.5 readers. I’m not famous enough to make shit like that happen.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy.