The first time most of us noticed Emily Blunt she was “’on-the-edge of sickness thin.” To play Emily Chalton, the prickly first assistant to the editor in The Devil Wears Prada, Blunt dropped pounds from her already slight frame. “It wasn’t like doughnuts were snatched out of my hand,” laughs the 5’ 7½’’ actress, but she was encouraged to slim down. So much so she would occasionally cry from hunger during the shoot. Luckily, though rake thin, she still had the energy to steal the movie from her more seasoned co-stars, Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci.
Although the character fell directly into the love-to-hate-her category, audiences found Blunt irresistible. Her mix of vulnerability and fork-tongued charm—crowned by crystal clear blue eyes and a face anchored with a cleft chin that would make Kirk Douglas envious—earned the title Best Female Scene-Stealer from Entertainment Weekly and nominations for everything from a Teen Choice Award to a Golden Globe.
This weekend she plays a much different character in the much-anticipated thriller The Girl on the Train. Based on the Paula Hawkins bestseller—11 million copies sold and counting—it’s a dark cinematic journey into a missing person’s case. The thirty-three year old actress says playing an alcoholic divorcée who witnesses a crime from a train window, “the most challenging thing I’ve ever done.”
Early reviews are strong. Variety raved she “excels as the broken-down heroine.” Those kind of kudos are an echo of her much-admired, though lesser seen work, in the UK.
After dabbling in drama at age 12 to help conquer a stutter she jumped to the small screen with praised performances in British television period pieces. It was, however, only when she left the lace-bonnets behind and took on a role in the critically-acclaimed My Summer of Love that she really made a splash. The story of a teenage infatuation between Mona (Nathalie Press) and the manipulative and cynical Tamsin (Blunt) earned both Press and Blunt equal shares in an Evening Standard British Film Award for Most Promising Newcomer.
Since then we’ve seen her as an oversexed young women opposite Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson’s War, warbling Stephen Sondheim’s rich Into the Woods score, riding a polar bear in The Huntsman: Winter’s War and dressed as Princess Diana in the quirky rom com Five-Year Engagement.
She’s done action in both Sicario and Edge of Tomorrow (later renamed Live. Die. Repeat. for home release). Big budget blockbusters don’t usually make room for female characters unless they are sidekicks or girlfriends. In Edge of Tomorrow Blunt avoids being objectified and is as strong, if not stronger than co-star Tom Cruise.
In Sicario she’s part of an elite task force stemming the flow of drugs between Mexico and the US. A multifarious mix of vulnerability, stone cold confidence and outrage, she delivered the most interesting female action star since Mad Max: Fury Road’s Imperator Furiosa.
Next up her diverse career is the lead in Mary Poppins Returns. She says she’s nervous because the flying nanny is “such an important character in people’s childhood,” but has been given the thumbs up by the original Mary, Julie Andrews. “It was lovely to get her stamp of approval. That took the edge off it, for sure.”
In recent years we’ve seen Emily Blunt warbling Stephen Sondheim’s rich “Into the Woods” score, riding a polar bear in “The Huntsman: Winter’s War” and dressed as Princess Diana in the quirky rom com “Five-Year Engagement.” She’s done big budget action, sci fi, period dramas and now she adds Hitchcockian thriller to her list of conquered genres.
In the much-anticipated thriller “The Girl on the Train” she is Rachel a woman whose life has taken a downward dive since her divorce from Tom (Justin Theroux). Alcoholic, unemployed and despondent, she obsesses about Tom, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), his new girlfriend—and former mistress—and their new baby.
To pass the time on her extended Lost Weekend she drinks vodka and rides a commuter train from the suburbs into Manhattan, even though she lost her high paying PR jobs ages before. Sitting in the third car from the front affords her the perfect view of her favourite house. It’s the home of Megan and Scott Hipwell (Haley Bennett and Luke Evans), a good looking couple with a seemingly perfect life to match their optimistic last name. “She’s everything I want to be,” says Rachel of Megan.
One afternoon as Rachel looks out the train window at the Hipwells she is enraged what she sees. A blur of booze later, she wakes up the next day, hungover and foggy, covered in bruises, to discover Megan has gone missing. Brain beating, blocking memories of the night before, she tries to piece together the events of the night before. Enter Mr. Hitchcock.
Based on the Paula Hawkins bestseller—11 million copies sold and counting—“The Girl on the Train” is not so much a psychological drama as much as it is a boozological one. Rachel is hammered for much of the first half of the film, making her an extremely unreliable narrator. What’s true and what’s not? That would involve giving away plot details that are best left unspoiled, but suffice to say that while there are ups and downs, they are more red herrings and misremembered clues filtered through a haze of booze. There are no “Gone Girl” flourishes here, just straightforward thriller elements banged together to point to an inevitable conclusion.
“Girl on the Train” has some elegant moments, and aspires to be an art house thriller/morality tale—no action, lots of internal dialogue—but to properly tell the story of infidelity and murder it should have embraced its down-and-dirty summertime beach reading origins.
Rising above the languid pacing and uneventful storyline is Blunt whose gut-wrenching, vanity-free performance carries the movie through its slow patches. She’s a raw nerve and if the movie had followed her lead and been just a bit more bleary eyed and blotchy, it may have been a more effective thriller.
Jennifer Lawrence continues her unbeaten streak (OK, I’m choosing to ignore “Serena”) with her regular dream team of director David O. Russell and co-stars Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro. “Joy” is slight but succeeds because we want her to succeed.
“Joy” is a real life female empowerment story that plays like a fairy tale. When we first meet Joy Mangano (Lawrence) she’s a young girl making a fairy tale kingdom out of bits of paper. When she’s told a prince would complete the picture she says, “I don’t need a prince,” suggesting that Joy may be headed for her own happily ever after, but will do it on her own terms.
As an adult she’s a single mom struggling to make ends meet. Her ex-husband (Edgar Ramirez) lives in the basement, her mother (Virginia Madsen) hasn’t left her bedroom in an alarmingly long time, her passive aggressive sister Peggy (Elisabeth Rohm) is more aggressive than passive and now it looks like her pig-headed father Rudy (Robert De Niro) needs a place to crash. Only grandma Mimi (Diane Ladd) provides unconditional love. “My whole life is like some sort of tragic soap opera,” she says.
When Rudy becomes involved with a wealthy widow named Trudy (Isabella Rossellini) a random incident leads to opportunity for Joy to reinvent herself. A red wine spill gives Joy the idea for a new kind of mop, a durable cleaning tool with a head made from a continuous loop of 300 feet of cotton that can be easily wrung out without getting the user’s hands wet. She called it the Miracle Mop and with a sizable loan from Trudy tries to bring her invention to market. She meets with slammed doors until the mop becomes a hit on the home shopping network QVC. Still, even with sales in the tens of thousands she has problems wringing a profit out of her mops.
“Joy” is a thoroughly enjoyable movie elevated by the strength of its performances. The film itself feels a bit sloppy—maybe that’s because there are four credited editors—but Lawrence and cast mop up the mess with top-notch performances.
De Niro often get accused of taking paycheques roles these days but his work in “Joy” proves he’s not on permanent cruise control. As Rudy he’s the worst kind of dim bulb, a hard-headed old-timer with too much confidence. It’s a complex comedic performance that will make you wish De Niro made more movies with Russell and fewer with everyone else (except maybe for Scorsese).
Bradley Cooper makes the most of a small role as the fast-talking QVC executive but it is the third part of Russell’s Golden Acting Triad—Jennifer Lawrence—who brings the joy to “Joy.”
For the second time this year, following “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2,” Lawrence dominates a big movie by sheer talent and strength of will. As Mangano she’s gritty, funny and completely genuine in a role that should earn her another Best Actress Oscar nomination.
“Joy” is a success story whose fast-paced joyfulness in performance and pacing makes up for the bumpy execution.
Richard’s CP24 reviews about the big movies opening on Christmas Day: Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling in the financial drama “The Big Short,” Quentin Tarantino’s neo-western “The Hateful Eight,” “Joy,” starring Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro and Will Smith in “Concussion.”
Richard and “Canada AM” guest host Melissa Grelo discuss the big movies opening on Christmas Day: Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling in the financial drama “The Big Short,” Quentin Tarantino’s neo-western “The Hateful Eight,” “Joy,” starring Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro and Will Smith in “Concussion.”
In “Deliver Us From Evil” Eric Bana is Sarchie, an NYPD cop partnered with Butler (Joel McHale), his wisecracking sidekick.
Like Messrs. Tango and Cash, they are fearless but somewhat mismatched. Sarchie is a cop with “radar,” a nose for trouble, while Butler is a wisenheimer who, when a disheveled suspect grimaces at him, foaming at the mouth, says, “Do you think she’s single?”
A series of seemingly unrelated 911 calls—a domestic dispute, an incident at a zoo and a possible home invasion—change the story from cop drama to supernatural police procedural. Strange things happen. Holy candles won’t burn in the house of one of the 911 callers. One of the perps speaks Latin and scratches until her fingers bleed.
Skeptical at first Sarchie refuses to blame “invisible fairies” for the strange behavior, but working with a Jesuit Priest, Father Mendoza (Édgar Ramírez), Sarchie and Butler become convinced there is more at play here than just human nature.
The investigation leads them to a trio of men, (Chris Coy, Dorian Missick and Sean Harris) soldiers who returned from Iraq with PTDS (Post Traumatic Demonic Possession.) Piecing together the links becomes a dangerous job for Butler, Sarchie and even the officer’s family (Oliver Munn and daughter played by Lulu Wilson).
“Delivers Us From Evil” relies on jump scares—those “boo” moments that get your heart racing—and while a few of the jumps work, most simply deliver a jolt with nothing behind it, but there is at least one shock cat lovers are going to h-a-t-e.
There is plenty of atmosphere—apparently it rains all the time in the Bronx—and a few creepy moments—was that a snake or an old pipe?—but the truly eerie stuff is underplayed when a movie like this should be really dialing up the action.
It’s all a bit dull. There are no truly memorable moments. We’ve seen the exorcism stuff before—without the head spinning and pea soup—in everything from “The Exorcist” to “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” but the thing that really sinks the movie’s momentum aren’t the stock characters or lack of new thrills but the exposition scenes that explain the obvious. Director Scott Derrickson, who also made the considerably creepier “Sinister,” doesn’t trust the audience to follow the simple story so he has the characters walk us through it almost one line at a time.
“Deliver Us From Evil” doesn’t feel like a summer movie. Usually we look to July and August to deliver us from lame movies but this one has the feel of those horror flicks starring a familiar-but-less-than-household-name that fills up theatres in January and February.
The spooky new supernatural thriller Deliver Us From Evil sees Eric Bana play a jaded NYC police officer. “I’ve seen some horrible things,” he says, “but nothing that can’t be explained by human nature.”
That changes when he meets a renegade priest (Édgar Ramírez) who convinces him a plague of demonic possession has infected the Big Apple. Working together, they combat the evil forces with exorcism and faith.
Deliver Us From Evil is based on a nonfiction book of the same name authored by Ralph Sarchie (with Lisa Collier Cool), a sixteen-year NYPD veteran who investigates “cases of demonic possession and (assists) in the exorcisms of humanity’s most ancient—and most dangerous—foes,” in his spare time.
“Before going out on a case,” he writes, “I put aside my gun and police badge and arm myself with holy water and a relic of the True Cross.”
Sarchie’s story joins a long list of exorcism movies with roots in true events.
The Exorcist, the granddaddy of all demon possession movies, is based in part on the 1949 case of an anonymous Maryland teenager dubbed Roland Doe. He was determined by the Catholic Church to be under a diabolical spell when strange things started happening — levitating furniture and holy water vials crashing to the ground — after he played with a Ouija board.
Exorcist author William Peter Blatty first heard about Doe’s story when he was a student at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. in 1950. He drew from newspaper reports and a diary kept by the attending priest, Fr. Raymond Bishop, as the backbone of his novel.
The character of Father Lankester Merrin, the elderly priest and archeologist played by Max von Sydow in the movie, was based on British archaeologist Gerald Lankester Harding. Blatty said Harding “was the physical model in my mind when I created the character, whose first name, please note, is Lankester.”
In recent years hits like The Rite, starring Anthony Hopkins as a real life exorcist tutor, and The Exorcism of Emily Rose with Tom Wilkinson as a priest accused of murder when a young woman died during an exorcism, are based on true events.
Finally in The Possession, a haunted antique carved “Dybbuk” box — containing an evil, restless spirit — turns the behaviour of a young girl (Natasha Calis) from angelic to animalistic. The owner of the real-life box offered to send it to producer Sam Raimi but the filmmaker declined. “I didn’t want anything to do with it,” he said. “I’m scared of the thing.”
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
