Woman Around Town’s Editor Charlene Giannetti and writers for the website talk with the women and men making news in New York, Washington, D.C., and other cities around the world. Thanks to Ian Herman for his wonderful piano introduction.
Beckford is not a suicide spot. Beckford is a place to get rid of troublesome women.
The very first page of Into the Water by Paula Hawkins whose debut novel The Girl on the Train became a global best-seller is a re-imagining of a horrific historic moment. A young girl accused of witchcraft is ‘tested’ by seeing whether the water will accept or reject her. Her death by drowning ‘proves’ her innocence. This is a story of drowned women with a touch of the uncanny to the whole proceedings. One of the central characters is a self-proclaimed psychic who speaks to the dead and is reportedly a descendant of an executed witch. It’s also a story about stories; there’s a double manuscript within the book, including and most especially those stories we tell ourselves. Like The Girl on the Train, Hawkins explores the fluid, imperfect, nature of memory and how easy it is for people to construct false narratives. Which means we are treated to a series of unreliable narrators.
The first such narrator is Jules Abbott a thirty something social worker who’s shocked to learn that her estranged sister Nell has purportedly jumped off the Beckford bridge and left Jules custodian of her teenaged daughter the beautiful, troubled Lena. Beckford’s bridge and infamous ‘drowning pool’ have seen the deaths of many women over the years, including a teenage girl only a few months before. Indeed Nell Abbott had a morbid fascination with the site and was writing a book about it; something that put her on the bad side of a number of local residents. Jules Abbott is forced to confront the past she’s spent over twenty years running from and learns hard truths along the way. Nor is she the only one. There are more than a few secrets in Beckford. Hawkins is working with a larger canvas here than in her debut and with far more characters. It was risky but she pulls it off with a writing style that’s lyrical, elegiac, melancholy, and macabre all at once. It’s a book you’ll want to read in one sitting and the final pages with echo with you long afterwards.
The publishing industry and the movie industry are lemmings, following popular trends rather than thinking outside the box to come up with something exciting and different. When a new book or film does break out – The Hunger Games (first book, then film) – everyone rushes to replicate that success. So we have had a whole series of dystopian novels and films ad nauseam, none as great as the one which started the trend.
We can say the same about Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn’s psychological thriller which was a bestseller and went on to become a film starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike. Girl on a Train by Paula Hawkins also became a film, this one with Emily Blunt. So we can imagine all those intrepid editors at publishing houses going through slush piles trying to find the next thriller featuring a slightly crazed female protagonist and coming up with A Simple Favor by first time novelist Darcey Bell.
Like its predecessors, A Simple Favor follows a similar pattern. The woman at the center of the plot is narcissistic and unbalanced, but, like so many people with these characteristics, she can skillfully manipulate others to play along with anything she cooks up. The problem with this set up is that the protagonist and everyone around her become unsympathetic and unlikeable. (That was certainly the case with Gone Girl. Did anyone like Affleck’s character, even though he was the victim?) And without someone to latch onto, root for, the characters become annoying and the plot frustrating.
In A Simple Favor, Emily is in the driver’s seat. She seems to have it all – good looks, an attractive husband, Sean, who is British and works in finance, an adorable son, Nicky, a gorgeous home in suburban Connecticut, and a high-profile job working for a famous fashion designer, Dennis Nylon. She also seems nice, befriending odd duck Stephanie, a widow with a son, Miles, who spends her time writing a mommy blog. Stephanie is so needy that when Emily throws her a lifeline she grabs it with a vengeance. Soon the two are inseparable, spending afternoons stretched out on Emily’s huge sofa, drinking white wine, while their two sons enjoy a playdate. When Emily asks that her friend pick up Nicky after school, Stephanie is only too happy to help. But then Emily disappears and Stephanie is frantic that something has happened to her friend.
Stephanie tells part of her story in her blog, part in straight narrative. While Bell nails the tone and substance of a mommy blog, these passages are irritating. The condescending, cheerful content begins to grate, although this might be intentional on Bell’s part. After Emily’s disappearance, Stephanie uses the blog to enlist support to help find her friend (since she says her readers come from all part of the country, this seems a stretch). When it appears Emily is dead, she continues to keep everyone updated on Sean and Nicky.
There are many revelations and Bell skillfully doles them out. Truth be told, Bell has produced a page turner, even though the characters – Emily, Stephanie, and Sean – continue to act in ways that are off-putting and exasperating. By the end of the book, not one of the trio is anyone a normal person would want to spend time with. But we will be spending more time with them. A Simple Favor will soon be a feature film from Fox.
What would you do if you realized that there are aspects of your life that you have completely missed and the truth of what you’ve been living isn’t real? The Girl on the Train doesn’t particularly set out to answer this question, which is a shame. The film, based on the novel by Paula Hawkins, is a mystery thriller that sometimes touches on fascinating aspects of character development, only to then turn into a Lifetime film with a bloody and unsatisfying end.
“She’s everything I lost. She’s everything I want to be,” says Rachel (Emily Blunt) as she creepily watches Megan (Haley Bennett), a complete stranger to her, from the train. The obsession with watching Megan is, in part, due to the fact that Rachel’s own life is a miserable one and she believes the life the other woman leads to be one of perfection. Rachel rides the train into Manhattan everyday, sits in the same car, and watches Megan be happy with her husband, Scott (Luke Evans). We discover fairly soon that Rachel used to live two houses down from Megan, once sharing a home with her husband, Tom (Justin Theroux), who left her to be with Anna (Rebecca Ferguson).
Rachel’s stalking and curiosity eventually find her in the middle of an investigation after Megan disappears without a trace. An alcoholic who constantly blacks out, Rachel finds herself plunged into a mystery that places her at the scene of Megan’s last known location. With no alibi, she takes it upon herself to find out what happened, involving herself in a situation that reveals connections and truths she isn’t quite prepared for.
It’s the thrill of the chase and mystery of the disappearance. The characters kind of take a back seat and in a lot of ways, the plot drives the story, not the other way around. Told largely through Rachel’s perspective, we become privy to the fact that something is amiss early on. Her memory isn’t always reliable and makes the unfolding mystery easier to tell because of it.
However, the film is less concerned with expanding on Rachel’s story. We understand later the truth behind certain events and how they were twisted in her memory, but the skipping around between flashbacks and present day disentangle us from the central characters. Sure, there is some sympathy to go around, but because it never really delves into certain character’s motivations, the rapport we may have had with any of them often falls flat.
Tate Taylor’s direction is unable to adapt to the flow of the plot. Emily Blunt’s performance saves the movie from going completely off the rails, clearly portraying Rachel’s emotional instability and constant weariness in every scene, adding weight to an otherwise weightless script. On the flip side, Haley Bennett does well with the little she’s given, adding some depth to Megan’s story, while Rebecca Ferguson gets the short end of the stick. Ultimately, however, The Girl on the Train shortchanges its characters for mystery and shock value, culminating in a bloody finale. But it’s all too underwhelming, stagnant, and the film’s ending, especially, leaves a lot to be desired.
The Girl on the Train opens nationwide October 7, 2016.
