BEFORE: I didn't have many options coming out of "Hardcore Henry", just one in fact. Haley Bennett carries over (oh, great, because she did such a super acting job last night as "emotionless wife in peril and also cyber-zombie scientist").
THE PLOT: A divorced woman becomes entangled in a missing persons investigation that promises to send shockwaves throughout her life.
AFTER: I've ranted in this space before, time and time again, about the horrible trend of fractured narratives, or "time-jumping" if you will, which is a convenient technique used by screenwriters and directors to cover up obvious problems with story structure. This film is another of those terrible offenders, where a sequence titled "Last Friday" will be followed with one titled "Four Months Ago" and then one called "Now" (Umm, when is "Now" exactly, because that's always changing?) and so on. I've been known to go easy on films that use this technique for the slow dissemination of valuable information, but this is a gross misuse of the technique in murder mystery form, as each scene is used to dole out crumbs to a starving audience.
I never read the book this was based on, only heard about its reputation through reviews, but the book just CAN'T be structured this way, can it? Because I imagine mystery readers would get SO frustrated with a story told so horribly out of order that they'd tear the book apart and throw it up in the air, just in the hope that the pages might land in some form of more coherent order than the one presented. You just can't jump around this way in a mystery, I'll allow a flashback or maybe two, but this is beyond the pale. Within 15 minutes it felt like I was being completely dicked around. There's an art to revealing information in a mystery story, and manipulating the time stream has nothing artful about it. It's like forcing someone to do a jigsaw puzzle but only giving them a fraction of the pieces at a time, or if someone came to you with a half-solved Rubik's cube, and you tried to help them by hitting them over the head with it.
Our main character is someone who rides the Metro-North train to and from NYC each day, returning to some point north of where she used to live, and wondering about the lives of the people in the houses she passes, because she can see snippets of their backyard lives from the train, which seems to conveniently slow down or even stop near a particular set of houses each day. This woman (who happens to be an alcoholic) seems to be someone who makes up stories in her head about those people's daily lives, even drawing pictures of them. Only later we find out that she used to live on that street herself, in one of those houses, so why would she make up names and stories when she already KNOWS their names. Sorry, I have to call the first of many NITPICK POINTS on this one. And here's the start of the manipulation, as we the audience are dicked around from the very beginning here.
I dig the idea of an unreliable narrator, I really do. "Memento" worked very well with this, the character who was driving the story had no short-term memory, he only had his memories from before the traumatic incident, and beyond that, he had to rely on his own tattoos and Post-It notes to remind him of his own daily routine. (Note to self: it might be time to watch "Memento" again - I think enough time has passed from when I used to watch it over and over...). And then the true brilliance of "Memento" was that the scenes played out in backwards order, putting the audience in the same position as the character, not knowing what had gone before, only being able to live in the Now (Umm, when exactly is that, again?) as we try to suss everything out.
I can only imagine that the feeble attempt here is to put the audience in the same position as drunk Rachel, so that we never know what's going on, or what happened before (because we haven't seen it yet) and our heads are spinning so much that it might be a good idea to make ourselves puke just to gain a little clarity so we can make it home.
The film does understand alcoholism, but only up to a point. Rachel's seen in NYC's famous Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal, having knocked back several martinis while confiding in a fellow drinker she doesn't know, and for a short while, that person's her best friend in the world. This all tracks - but it just doesn't seem possible for her to do certain things, or even be led to believe herself capable of doing certain things while close to blackout drunk. Her memory is so spotty that she can't be sure that she didn't kill someone while drunk, and for a while I think she convinces herself that she may have done this - but it's not logically possible. Because, where's the damn body then? OK, maybe a drunk person could kill someone, but properly dispose of a body AND leave no evidence behind? No way. A drunk person would kill someone, start stuffing their body in a dumpster, black out halfway through from the effort, and leave a TON of trace evidence all over the place, and that just isn't the situation here.
Besides, if she learned information about this case WHILE drunk, then getting sober's just not the correct way to try and remember it again. She's got to get JUST AS drunk as she was before, and go back to the same location to trigger those memories loose. Geez, didn't anybody else see "Beerfest"?
What's even worse than the time-jumping is the fact that the story is presented, at first, as three separate stories, and they take their sweet time to intersect. The stories of Rachel, Megan and Anna are all connected, but again, the figuring out how they all impact each other comes about through information that's given to us like drops of water to someone crossing the desert. Without giving away any spoilers, I can say that Rachel's been drunk-dialing her ex-husband, Tom, who's now married to Anna, and Anna's nanny is Megan. There, was that difficult? It took me 10 seconds to explain the connections, and it took this film about half an hour to get there. My time is valuable, Hollywood, so don't dick me around.
Here's what I think the fractured narrative is covering up - it's a simple case. Well, OK, all mysteries are simple cases once you know the answer. But there are only 6 main characters here, and if one of them disappears, most likely one of the other 5 is responsible. Having all of the information at the start about the connections would have made this a 5-minute mystery, so therefore the film has to spend much more time NOT telling me things that are constructive. Compare this to the process of Sherlock Holmes, who would eliminate the impossible scenarios until he was left with the only possible, though highly improbable, solution. This film does the opposite, choosing to explore everything, probable or not, for 90 minutes and never quite eliminating or landing on anything until it's nearly too late.
Another difference between "Sherlock Holmes" and this film - in Holmes' cases, Inspector LeStrade was always the dumb one, the goat from Scotland Yard that had the simplest, worst ideas about the case. In "The Girl on the Train", the detective is not only the smartest one, she's maybe even a little TOO smart. Because she figures out the connection Rachel has to the case and tracks her down just a couple days after the missing person goes missing - and at that point she somehow knows everything about her, having spoken with 11 of her friends and co-workers already, which doesn't seem possible given the time constraint. So instead of forming a search party and actually LOOKING for the missing woman, it made more sense to gather extensive background information on a person who had the smallest of connections to the case? This just doesn't track, either.
But the detective character has the best lines, which are very insightful to both the other characters, and also as background help in understanding the story. The line where she chides Rachel about her theory on the case is as follows: "That's pretty coincidental, isn't it? You just happen to be on a train at the exact moment that you don't know - but somehow recognize - is cheating on her husband?" And that one line also conveniently highlights the main story problem at that point. More words of genuine wisdom from Detective Riley: "Let me give you some advice. Don't go back to Beckett Road. Don't contact your ex-husband. Don't go anywhere near Anna Watson or her baby." And that SHOULD have been the end of the film right there, but unfortunately it was not. And one last gem: "There are a lot of loose ends here that suggest something, but they don't add up to much." Yep, I agree, tell me about it, sister...
Plus, show me one likable character, that's all I ask. One person who's not having an affair, or drunk-dialing their ex, or trying to figure out their spouse's computer password. It feels like there's no one to root for - even the main character is guilty of entering her ex-husband's home, while his new wife sleeps, and walking off with their BABY. Even if she was drunk, there's no way this is acceptable or even explainable behavior. When they showed this incident in flashback for the second (or was it third?) time, I thought, "Oh, surely this time there will be more information from the other character's POV, and we'll understand why she did this." Nope, because that's still a BAD thing that rational people do NOT do, and there can be no rational justification for it. What gives here? Did she think the baby was in danger? Was there a fire down the block that we didn't see before? Did the baby's mother not believe in vaccinations, so she was taking it upon herself to bring the baby to get its shots? Nope, there's no explanation offered here, just a silent shrug from the director - "I don't know, just let the audience figure this out..."
It turns out that alcohol's not just a crutch for drinkers, it's also a convenient one for storytellers.
Also starring Emily Blunt (last seen in "The Huntsman: Winter's War"), Rebecca Ferguson (last seen in "Florence Foster Jenkins"), Justin Theroux (last seen in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi"), Luke Evans (last seen in "Beauty and the Beast"), Allison Janney (last heard in "Finding Dory"), Edgar Ramirez (last seen in "Bright"), Lisa Kudrow (last seen in "Wonderland"), Laura Prepon, Darren Goldstein (last seen in "Limitless"), Cleta Elaine Ellington.
RATING: 3 out of 10 broken mirrors
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