geezer cinema: the girl on the train (tate taylor, 2016)

Well, it had to happen. The whole point of Geezer Cinema is that my wife and I, in our retirement, make a weekly date to watch a movie, taking turns choosing. We've been doing this for more than 3 1/2 years now, as we approach our 70th birthdays. So this week, my wife took a little time about her choice, and finally came up with The Little Things, from 2021. It's just the kind of movie she picks: mystery about a serial killer, starring Denzel Washington. In fact, we have proof it's the kind of movie she picks, because she also picked it back in 2021. This week marks the 177th Geezer Movie, and I'm surprised it's taken us this long to forget we'd seen a previous choice.

So, my wife went back to the drawing board, and chose The Girl on the Train, with Emily Blunt and an interesting supporting cast. Blunt plays Rachel, divorced fairly recently and not doing to well adapting. She lives with her sister, she drinks too much, and on her commute each day she looks out the train window at the home she used to live in, where her ex-husband now resides with a new wife and a kid. The screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary) lets us share Rachel's confusion, and the plot twists are surprising enough, to me at least. Rachel is a mess, and as she looks out her train window she imagines the lives of the women she sees are much happier and calmer than her own. The more she learns about those women, though, the more she realizes she isn't the only troubled woman in the world.

Emily Blunt is powerful throughout ... she plays a great drunk, her eyes often glazed over but with a hidden intelligence that lets you know she is eventually going to get to the bottom of things. How much you enjoy the movie depends on how much you buy into the plot. I was engrossed, never bored, but never really engaged, and the time shifts seemed designed more to keep us in the dark than to help tell the story. But your mileage may vary.