The movie “The Girl on the Train” came out this past weekend and, having read and loved the book, it’s safe to say I was anxiously anticipating the film’s arrival. The book alone was enough advertising for me to get to the nearest theater and see the story unfold on the big screen. No movie trailers or reviews from big-wig movie critics were needed. Sadly, and as expected, the movie was nothing compared to the book.
It’s typical for book-lovers to find movies always falling short of the books they’re based on. I have seen many book-turned-movies in the past and the only ones that really live up to the books are the Harry Potter movies. In the specific case of “The Girl on the Train,” the movie subtly changed the plot of the book, which is a big no-no for the millions of people who enjoyed the best-selling novel. Simple things, such as the timing of the introduction of a certain character, or the revelation of pertinent information, changed the plot to make it less believable and almost laughable. Additionally, the movie decided not to change the perspective of the storytelling as much as it did in the book. Various chapters were told by specific characters, but the movie decided to leave this bit out, most likely for conciseness.
The novel gained massive popularity because of the good timing of its release, which was right after the reign of another thriller, “Gone Girl.” Book clubs were looking for their next read to satisfy the hole that the ending of “Gone Girl” created, so they turned to “The Girl on the Train.” Like “Gone Girl,” “The Girl on the Train” has the general idea where you, as the reader, have a hard time choosing which story to believe. The author of “The Girl on the Train,” Paula Hawkins, switches between perspectives in attempts to give a holistic view of what occurred, while simultaneously fogging what you believe to be true. The main character, Rachel, is an alcoholic who barely remembers the events that led up to the murder of another character, making her an unreliable narrator. Through the change in perspectives and complex story-telling, the reader doesn’t gain clarity of the murder until Rachel does.
Simply put, the book gets lost in translation when changed into the movie. Unlike the adaption of “Gone Girl,” “The Girl on the Train” barely played with the idea of storytelling in the movie version of the story. In the novel, the reader almost gets frustrated with Rachel for not remembering, losing their faith that she is aware of what happens and suspecting that she had something to do with the murder. This idea is almost immediately shattered in the movie and the audience automatically begins to pity the main character, which leads to us believing in her innocence.
It also doesn’t help that Emily Blunt was chosen to play Rachel, the washed-out alcoholic, but when we see her on the screen, it still just looks like Emily Blunt. Aside from some smudged makeup, there is hardly anything that distinguishes her from being Rachel in this movie, and Emily, a posh assistant in The Devil Wears Prada. In a review by The New York Times, the critic argued that “Her stardom is our light at the end of the tunnel, a flickering promise.” The lack of time spent on the fact that the main character is unreliable makes the plot twist at the end of the movie anticlimactic compared to when you read the ending in the book, which, by the way, was epic.
I loved the book because of its delivery, the way that it smudged the idea of reliable storytelling. The movie just didn’t do that. Despite its attempts to recreate the way Hawkins switched perspectives between characters with different camera angles and other minor details that almost go unnoticed, the general story fell flat as the movie quickly glazed over important structural elements emphasized in the book. Sometimes, movies just can’t create the same anticipation that a book can because of this reason, which gives them little chance of living up to their literary counterparts.
