Gold Cert: 15 / 121 mins / Dir. Stephen Gaghan / Trailer
And to gently ease our way out of the It's A True Story*1rut that is the early part of each year, comes Mumblin' Matthew McConaughey in the guise of one Kenny Wells, a gold-prospector down to his last chance after the 1988 financial crash. Making a written-on-a-napkin deal with a half-remembered contact in Indonesia, the pair take a punt and manage to land themselves a literal gold-mine. What could go wrong?
Everything, naturally.
The jungle of Borneo is filthy and damp, the boardrooms of New York are polished and plush, and McConaughey comes across like a walking midlife crisis. For all the niggles I had with it, Gold is a fine-looking film. If only the same level of enthusiasm had gone into Patrick Massett and John Zinman's screenplay. The movie never becomes more than you expected it to be and in the first hour particularly, struggles to make it that far. As excited and distraught as the various characters get, it's hard to feel any genuine emotion for grown men slobberingly chasing an unreachable dream. And while the film highlights the vacuousness of that dream at every turn, it still doesn't have the bite to become a morality-tale, just a rather sketchy study of edacity, faith and delusions of grandeur*2.
Gold doesn't wield the wanton excess of The Wolf of Wall Street, or hold the narrative resonance of The Big Short, although it still shares that air of naivety and chaos in the face of a beast which can't be tamed: greed. It's not even that you find yourself willing Kenny to succeed, more that you're just wondering how hard he's going to fail. Because no story that starts out from a place of unashamed, capitalist avarice really deserves a happy ending.
While McConaughey's on the reasonably good form which is fast becoming his autopilot and Edgar Ramírez supports well but feels under-used, the best performance here may be from Bryce Dallas Howard as his long-suffering girlfriend Kay. It's certainly the only thing in the film which feels remotely real, at any rate. Meanwhile, everyone else is basically a placeholder; this is Mumblin' Matt's show. It's just not his best one.
For all its exuberance, Gold is a passable story, unremarkably told.
Not unless you need to see McConaughey's paunchy, balding, wonky-toothed chrysophilist on a massive screen.
Well I'm not entirely sure what the film's setting out to do, so…
Well, no.
I shouldn't imagine so.
There isn't.
Level 1: This has got Toby 'additional voice-work in The Old Republic and yes that still counts' Kebbell in it.
*1 The film's opening card which reads "inspired by true events" is about as loose a commitment to reality as you'll find in the film, not that it really matters for the story being told. [ BACK ]
*2 And no, the irony isn't lost on me that I used the phrase "delusions of grandeur" almost immediately after shoehorning the word "edacity" into the text. Snarky comments to the usual address, please. [ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Now you could go to see The Girl On The Train and compare it, perhaps unfavourably, to last year's Gone Girl. Alternatively, you could make the same comparison after watching the trailer and save yourself two hours*1...
Troubled commuter Rachel gazes out of the train window every day, imagining the details of the perfect lives of strangers. But when one such subject, Megan Hepwell*2, goes missing, a police investigation turns up unexpected connections between the two and unearths more uncertainty than it resolves...
Tate Taylor's adaptation of the best-selling novel runs in dual timelines, each slowly filling in the past and the present, intertwining to paint a full picture (yeah, like Gone Girl). And that's fine, but the drawback is that the past of the core players becomes much more important (and more interesting) than their present/future. Despite a sizeable secondary and tertiary cast-list, there are really only five characters in the story (and one of them's dead for most of it. Spoilers), so when the curtain is lifted on the final reveal it works, but you could imagine three other versions of the film showing different outcomes and being just as convincing. With this in mind, it's probably not unfair to say that the performances in The Girl On The Train are far better than the film itself.
Speaking of which, Emily Blunt's performance in particular is far better than everyone else's. I was initially concerned that she opens the film basically 'turned up to 10' as neurotic alcoholic Rachel, because where do you take things from there? But to her eternal credit, as the film slowly digs deeper and piles up tension around the character, Blunt sustains her unhinged intensity perfectly. Haley Bennett and Rebecca Ferguson both put in strong turns, albeit with slightly flimsier characters; Justin Theroux and Edgar Ramírez chew the scenery slightly as one-note placeholders (in a nice reversal of typical Hollywood gender-typecasting); and Luke Evans seems to have peaked for the year, so is back to comedy-scowling and failing to control an accent in a built-up screenplay. Bless him.
All in all, The Girl On The Train is a pretty good thriller. It's just nowhere near as groundbreaking or insightful as it seems to hope it is*3.
It's not essential to your enjoyment of the film, no.
I think so, but it's not trying to reinvent the genre or anything.
Blunt is on top form here, with reliably solid support.
Nah.
Nah.
Level 2: You remember when that Emily Blunt was in Wild Target with that Ewan 'Kenobi' McGregor? Well, she was…
*1 That joke stolen wholesale and unashamedly from Mr Stewart Lee.
*2 Although Megan's life isn't that perfect, is it? Water-view from her balcony or not, she's still got a commuter-level train track running past the bottom of the garden. Good luck trying to get a lie-in with that racket going on…
*3 Although it's nice that when you find out who-did-it, there's no deep psychological layering to explore. It's just "yeah, because [person] is an arsehole, mate". Which is probably far, far closer to most real-life cases of this type, I'm guessing. Fair play.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
