For the week of January 16th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing The Girl on the Train to Blu-ray. The biggest problem The Girl on the Train faces is its source material. Author Paula Hawkins' book, an Agatha Christie riff about an unstable alcoholic (played in the film by Emily Blunt) whose obsession with a beautiful former neighbor (Haley Bennett, who's a gorgeous face in search of a more interesting performer) takes a dark turn when Said Neighbor goes missing, might have been a runaway success, but it also was too self-important to be too much fun (Hawkins wanted you to take her flat characterizations seriously) and WAY too predictable. But in some ways, the best movie adaptations come from the worst (or least consequential) books because you can scrap everything that sucks and just keep the core ideas. Mario Puzo's turgid, overwrought Godfather doesn't come close to approaching the grandeur of Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 Academy Award winner, while The Girl on the Train's closest antecedent, Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl got the David Fincher bump that turned it from passable timewaster into an acidly funny and very disturbing excoriation of unfair gender politics. Problem is, Tate Taylor is directing The Girl on the Train, and Tate Taylor is no David Fincher. I liked his 2011 adaptation of The Help, but that sort of film is more in his wheelhouse: genial, uncomplicated, and inoffensive. He lacks Fincher's ability to elevate this pulp through either aesthetic mastery or narrative propulsion, and so he leans way too hard on the twists inherent in Hawkins' original novel, twists that get a whole lot less interesting as the plot starts clicking into place. Put it this way: I blame Hawkins for playing fast and loose with head injuries as a device to hide a couple of obvious plot developments in plain sight, as well as the way she can't deviate from Roger Ebert's "Law of Economy of Characters" (namely, in a mediocre thriller, all the characters need to serve some dramatic purpose, so if it looks like someone isn't important, then they're the killer). I blame Taylor for adding nothing that transcends these tired elements. Well, almost nothing. If The Girl on the Train deserves any attention, it's for Emily Blunt's work as the film's alcoholic heroine. On the page, Rachel is just a collection of archetypes: at any given point, she might be a gender-swapped take of Humphrey Bogart's Big Sleep P.I., a beyond-unreliable narrator a la Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart, or the airport-paperback version of Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, but dammed if Blunt doesn't turn this unholy mélange into something resembling a real person. She's officially a bonafide moviestar, the kind of presence who can elevate tired material through force of intelligence and will, so I guess The Girl on the Train isn't a complete watch. I suspect you might even love it if you catch it as an inflight movie.
Martin Liebman wrote that "the movie is technically well made and, for a story so based on careful exposition rather than crude dialogue, it's not bad. And perhaps it would work better for those who have not read the book beforehand. The movie just feels suffocated, forcing a lot of plot points that in the book developed much more organically and understandably as the three characters' perspectives gracefully and carefully shed light on the greater world and mystery and built themselves - and through their prisms one another - with incredible coherence and attention to detail. So much of the book is about perception - how Rachel perceives others, how they perceive her - and that's captured on film at a basic level, but not to the sort of story-shaping clarity the book provides. The movie does its best. It's a competent thriller that handles the sordid crisscross relationships, dark secrets, and other surprises with enough dramatic muscle - even if it's almost all the story and not anything the movie does with it - to get from one sequence to the next with as much logical connection as possible...Taking it by itself, though, the movie doesn't stand apart as anything remotely special."
From Sony Pictures Home Entertainment comes the long-awaited Blu-ray release of Michael Mann's 2001 biopic Ali. Mann is exactly the kind of person you want directing docudramas. His intimate, hyperkinetic focus on character and detail creates a sense of place that's pretty much unparalleled within the biopic realm; at their best (like Mann's masterful journalism saga The Insider), you feel less like you're watching a compendium of "I was born; I grew up" clichés and more like you've been transported into the here-and-now. Much that is great about, say, The Insider also applies to this far-ranging study of iconic boxer Muhammad Ali (played by Will Smith). Mann's direction is peerless, seamlessly blending John Myhre's vivid production with Emmanuel Lubezki's gorgeous widescreen cinematography in order to create a hyperdimensional experience: you don't even need the 3D glasses to feel like you're standing next to Ali in the ring, training with him in Zaire, or trying to withstand the rhetorical firing squad at any number of charged press conferences (props, too, for Mann's canny, sparse use of DV cameras: Mann uses to X-ray even further into Ali at key moments). And he's put together a hell of a cast, whether we're talking the Oscar-nominated performances from Smith and Jon Voight (unrecognizable under heavy prosthetics as sportscaster Howard Cosell) or the less strongly heralded work of Mario Van Peebles, Ron Silver, Jada Pinkett Smith, and especially Jamie Foxx, who steals the film as Ali's tragically human cornerman Drew "Bundini" Brown. Yet for all the excellence on display, Ali evinces a problem that Mann has been struggling with throughout his career. As skilled as he is at corralling all these details together, he has a tendency to let them overwhelm the film at the expense of everything else. After watching Ali, I can recall with total clarity the sensation of hearing Sam Cooke croon to an audience of adoring fans (the opening six minutes, which cut between a rapturous Cooke set and Ali's intense training, might be the best thing Mann has ever done); I've got a gut-sense of the communities that supported Ali in Zaire or the psychic unease backstage before he fought Sonny Liston. But I couldn't tell you what all of this means to Ali or why any viewers should care, beyond the obvious aesthetic/technical reasons. I'd also struggle to contextualize any of these details into a clear timeline: Mann immerses us in the physical details in and around the Liston match, but he also never clarifies which of the two 1964 brawls between the two we're supposed to be watching. Now, Mann has said before that he was less interested in telling a traditional biography than he was in creating an impressionistic portrayal of what it was like to be alive in the late-1960s and early-1970s, and viewed solely by that metric, Ali is a rousing success. It's still unsatisfying - you go into a film called Ali, and you expect to know a little more about the Champ at the end than you did at the beginning. For all of Smith's clear talent and commitment, his Ali remains a cipher, lost in the buzz of the world around him. Much as I'd hate to admit it, Mann should have made a more traditional film. At various points in its pre-production history, Ali centered on a) his relationship with his father (a briefly glimpsed Giancarlo Esposito), b) his bond with Malcolm X (Peebles), c) his conflicts balancing his personal relationships with his professional ones (here was a guy who could confide his most intimate secrets to a sportscaster, but he'd lie and cheat on his various spouses), and d) his global/political relevance around the world. Any of those paths would yield interesting results, but Mann tries servicing all of them, and so we never get more than a sketch in any direction. A beautiful, stunningly realized sketch, but a sketch just the same.
Far more controlled a feature is John Sturges' lean, economical 1955 thriller Bad Day at Black Rock, courtesy of Warner Archive. As seen in his great adventures The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, Sturges was a master at crafting taut adventures, and at just eighty-one minutes long, Bad Day at Black Rock provides the most concentrated example of Said Mastery. There are no frills on this one, which follows a taciturn one-armed man (Spencer Tracy) as he travels to the titular Western town so that he can...well, to say too much more would spoil some of the film's pleasures, but suffice to say, his presence puts him at odds with some very nasty people (including villains played by the wonderfully sleazy trifecta of Robert Ryan, Lee Marvin, and Ernest Borgnine). Sturges doesn't waste a second here, whether he's building the mystery around Tracy's character or letting his conflict with Ryan's men play out in stark, perfectly balanced widescreen compositions (this was one of MGM's first Cinemascope productions, and it remains one of the most effective, full stop). Furthermore, even within the picture's compact scope, Sturges juggles all sorts of genres, merging Western theatrics and noirish intrigue with kung-fu action, believe it or not, and all while layering in a bracing dose of post-WWII social commentary. You get the sense than John Carpenter studied this one closely, given how it reflects his own love of the Western balanced alongside vaguely disparate tones: we're seeing the genesis of Carpenter combining zombie horror with Rio Bravo for Assault on Precinct 13, or his infusion of Asian combat and mysticism into Big Trouble in Little China postmodern slapstick (further proof that Carpenter loves this movie? Tracy's hero shares the same name as Kurt Russell's character in The Thing). The sense of forward momentum is relentless, and as a result, Bad Day at Black Rock feels about half as long as it really is A B-movie, to be sure, but a perfect example of its kind.
Finally, the Criterion Collection is bringing Something Wild to Blu-ray. Viewers expecting a sexy, bubbly comedy similar to Jonathan Demme's great 1986 road movie are in for a rude awakening. This Something Wild - from director Jack Garfein - deals in a kind of emotional and sexual frankness that would have astounded viewers who caught the picture during its 1961 theatrical run. To wit: we open with college student Mary Ann (Carroll Baker, in a brave and fearless performance) minutes before she is assaulted and raped on the streets of New York, and things only get worse from there. Mary Ann grows so unable to process the attack that she begins systematically shutting down different aspects of her life - running away from her oblivious parents, renting a room in a seedy flophouse - before deciding to throw herself off the Manhattan Bridge...and that's when things get really bad. The second half of Something Wild turns into a psychological thriller of sorts, and one that has more in common with William Wyler's The Collector or the first half of Lenny Abrahamson's Academy Award-winning Room - nothing we've seen in the first half prepares us for what Mary Ann ultimately must confront. This whole section is riveting, in no small part because of Eugen Schüfftan's cinematography (the whole style changes from vérité grit to something far more expressionistic and disturbing) and a terrifying performance from Ralph Meeker, whose last name belies the palpable menace he brings to the proceedings. However, it's a long time coming, and I can't fault viewers for checking out before this sudden turn into more genre-esque thrills. Despite Baker's emotionally vivid work in the lead, much of her trauma plays as dated now - if you've watched any iteration of Law and Order, you've seen more graphic, realistic versions of this content. Furthermore, Garfein isn't in a rush to get to the second half's thematically/physically charged content, to the detriment of the whole film. This Something Wild runs a poky 112 minutes, and a more ruthless editor could trim a lot of the first half, from the many historically interesting-but-narratively suspect scenes of Mary Ann walking around New York to the many character bits that do little to flesh out our protagonist. In many ways, Something Wild acts as a showcase for different members of the Actors Studio, and as talented as people like Mildred Dunnock, Doris Roberts, and Jean Stapleton are, you could excise their work and only benefit the picture. As such, Something Wild exists as a curio more than anything else, a push against the content restrictions of the 1950s and early 1960s that would ultimately help lead to the provocative American New Wave of the late 1960s and 1970s. For that, I'm grateful. For this, one viewing is more than enough.
Svet Atanasov noted that "What makes the film unique is the fact that it openly embraces the concept of method acting that Lee Strasberg and his followers at the Actors Studio promoted during the 1950s and 1960s. Essentially, there is a wide range of unfiltered emotions on display and the situations that engage the actors are allowed to naturally evolve. So instead of being overly concerned with the eventual dramatic resolution, Garfein shifts the focus of attention exclusively to the emotional state of the main characters. A wide range of unfiltered emotions also defined the work of the directors that formed the Dogme movement during the 1990s (see Festen, Open Hearts). In these films there was also a similar emphasis on the natural progression of the events they chronicled. However, they were bound by very specific technical restrictions that ultimately gave them a very precise structure. In Garfein's film style, not structure, is of paramount importance because the city in which Mary Ann undergoes her transformations also becomes a key character. Despite protests from local union leaders, Garfein shot the film with European cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan (Eyes Without a Face, Le Quai Des Brumes). The opening titles were created by the legendary Saul Bass (Psycho, Vertigo)."