Reception of changes in Girl on the Train (2016) v. Psycho (1960)

It was rather a tradeoff with my significant o; we did the "guy flick" Mag 7 a few weeks ago and this one is more in the "chick flick" category. At least on a glance.

I had my own reactions to it without reading any reviews, but after I saw Girl on the Train, I went over to the Roger Ebert site(where today a small crew of critics together do the late Roger's work in his stead) and saw that the film had "One and a half stars." That's pretty bad. On the other hand, they gave "Mag 7" only two stars, and that's not much better.

Generally, my favorite films have rated three and a half to four stars in their reviews most years I pick them. Fargo and Sideways are in the four star area; action films like John Wick seem to top out at three stars. I think two stars is too low for the new "Mag 7".

I think one and a half stars is about right for "The Girl on the Train." Well, maybe two.

For watching it, I felt I was watching something along the lines of a "Lifetime movie"(and those have THEIR reputations) with a strain of "Oprah book club" thematics(most of the men in the film are threatening abusers, marital cheaters or disinterested ciphers), and only a so-so commitment to the rigors of the whodunit or the Hitchcock tradition(the latter sounds most nicely in how Emily Blunt, from the window of her daily NYC to the suburbs commute, sees various characters through...their windows.)

It makes "Gone Girl" -- and David Fincher -- and Ben Affleck -- look a whole lot better in that the plot, direction , and male acting in that earlier film which is more nuanced and in-depth than here. And the movies do share one element: a girl is gone.

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Readers of the book would be well ahead of me, but the film elects to alternate between three women: Emily Blunt -- the "girl" on the train, a mousy, tormented usually drunk protagonist; Haley Bennett(more on HER in a moment), the sexy blond gal with the hunky-muscles husband) and a job as a nanny to -- Rebecca Ferguson, a pretty blonde with her own handsome but not so muscled husband(Justin Thereoux, the somewhat mysterious in real life husband of Jennifer Anniston.) How do all these women interrelate? Well, I guess that's spoilers.

Following the book(I guess), "The Girl on the Train" leaps all over the place in time -- flashbacks, flashforwards, now, then -- and confusion runs rampant. Given that Emily Blunt's alcoholic character suffers blackouts, key scenes collapse into a blur just as something major starts to happen, and the "mystery is solved" simply by Emily FINALLY remembering what happened. And then, we are shown what happened. Mystery over. Seems a bit of a cheat to me, but perhaps the template here is "Marnie," with Marnie finally recovering her suppressed memories of murder.

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Ms. Blunt gets the central character and the most detailed characterization, and she's good at depicting a woman devastated by her husband's cheating on her and leaving her to move "the other woman' into his marriage and into their home. Its a painful role -- if one in which the things she does alternate from logical to ridiculous in their motivation.

But its Haley Bennett who is going to be the takeaway talked-about star here. I can only figure her SNL hosting job is only weeks away.

I think Haley Bennett is very pretty, and Hollywood just eats those young ladies right up when they get hot. (Margot Robbie is about two years ahead of her.) But Bennett has a problem: she looks a LOT, in certain shots, like Jennifer Lawrence. All the young folk on these boards are saying it, and I guess it is now a gag as well as a statement of fact, "you can get Jennifer Lawrence cheaper if you just hire Haley Bennett."

In The Magnificent Seven, Bennett wore red hair and no make-up and the Lawrence effect was more muted. In The Girl on the Train, Bennett goes blonde with make-up and sometimes, it is as if J-Law herself is in this thing. Though sometimes not -- Bennett's "unique" look is rather slit-eyed and Eastern European looking, in accord with the Russian call girl she played in "The Enforcer."

Can a new star be made to "echo" an existing one. I think its been done before. Marilyn Monroe was copycatted by Jayne Mansfield(low brow) and Kim Novak(high brow, once Hitchocck got her) and Novak maintained a star career of her own.

But often a "copycat star" doesn't make it -- John Gavin was no Rock Hudson; James Whitmore was no Spencer Tracy.

So here's what Haley Bennett does in "Girl on the Train" to separate out from J-Law: Nude scenes. And a lot of them. (Though with certain key body parts obscured.) Sex scenes. And a lot of them(though never for terribly long screen time.)

It is a calculated gamble for a young actress to start her career with nudity and sex scenes. But it can work. It did for Sharon Stone. It did for Jessica Lange(a few years in, in "The Postman Always Knocks Twice.") The trick is to establish yourself with the sexuality and then move on up in "serious roles." Sharon Stone eventually stopped doing nudity.

I think Haley Bennett has a few more movies in the can. The combination of "Mag 7" and "Girl on the Train" has launched her(though neither are blockbusters), we shall see.

In any event, its weird: you want to see Jennifer Lawrence in nude scenes and sex scenes? See Haley Bennett in "The Girl on the Train."

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"Girl on the Train" has opened lower than "Mag 7," which hasn't developed into much of a hit. I expect both films will make their main money out of theaters-- DVD , cable, streaming, etc.

Given my description above of what happens on screen in "The Girl on the Train," you can see it was a pretty easy watch. But it seemed very slight, very minor in the plotting, and not in the Hitchcock wheelhouse at all.(One thing I noticed is how this film's scenes and build of suspense seemed haphazard and overlong; Hitchocck at his best made sure that every scene was tight and to the point and advanced the story.)

Its funny. In recent years, I have found action movies to like for the year(John Wick) and I have found Westerns to like (True Grit, Mag 7) ..but I haven't really found any thrillers to like. Whether well-regarded high-brow like Gone Girl or this week's Lifetime-ish "Girl on the Train," these newer thrillers seem to be so far removed from what Hitchcock did that I sometimes think the thriller is a dead genre "on its own." In some ways, Hitchcock's era died with Hitchcock. Not only did we lose any more films from him, we generally lost the stand-alone pop classics like Charade and Mirage and Marathon Man and Three Days of the Condor. Silence of the Lambs was 25 years ago!

But hope springs eternal. Here's hoping for someone, somewhere, sometime, to get what Hitchcock got -- tight plots, interesting scenes, Big Suspense and action set-pieces. All in one package.

The Girl on the Train ain't it.

PS. One welcome if somewhat familiar element in "Girl on the Train": Allison Janey as the tough, cynical world-weary police detective who susses everybody out. We just had this part in "Gone Girl" with Kim Pickens, but Janey is more middle-aged and worn, kind of a female version of JK Simmons or William H. Macy...and Janey has a great voice. I did note that Janey's female detective gets all the cop lines while her male partner says nothing and follows her around. The perks of the chick flick thriller, I guess.