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\I,
David Margulies as Holocaust survivor Morris Herzman and Waltrudis Buck
as his wife, Rine, in The Girl on the Train
Film Noir With A Twist
4.01 ) ! 1 IA
Audiences will be taken for a ride by
u_t__
notifirPp4A
Girl on the Train.
Michael Fox
Special to the Jewish News
I
t takes confidence and even
audacity to weave the testimony of
a Holocaust survivor into the plot of
a psychological thriller — or any fiction
film, for that matter.
The risk of trivializing the suffering of
millions is continually present, with the
possibility that the audience will blast
the filmmaker for fortifying his work
with unearned gravitas.
So give props to Larry Brand, the
writer and director of The Girl on the
Train, for sidestepping those pitfalls and
pulling off a thought-provoking and
potentially controversial rumination
on our eagerness to believe stories. The
audience is taken for a ride, along with
the main character, and our susceptibil-
ity (gullibility?) is held up for review,
although not ridicule.
The Girl on the Train is scheduled to
open Friday, July 18, at Cinema Detroit
in Midtown.
Danny (Henry Ian Cusick of Lost)
is a documentary filmmaker recently
preoccupied with the idea of fate and
chance meetings. New Yorkers are
skeptics by nature, but a twinkle-eyed
survivor named Morris Herzman has
Danny (whose accent indicates he's from
the other side of the Atlantic) with his
remarkable saga.
Herzman (Jewish actor David
Margulies) recounts his deportation to
the camps and how his father nudged
him to the side of the car where it was
cooler and he could snatch an occa-
sional breath of fresh air. This allowed
young Morris to somehow glimpse a girl
through the slats when the train made a
brief stop — and for her to miraculously
drop a gold cross into his hand.
As Morris tells it (to Danny, but
really to us), this precious gift — or act
of kindness, or symbol that pockets of
humanity still existed — gave him the
determination to live.
We can understand how Morris'
experience might inspire Danny with
the seductive notion that a fleeting
encounter with a stranger could switch
his life from one track to another. So
when Danny sees a young woman (Nicki
Aycox) on a train who he'd previously
"encountered" in the midst of crowd
scenes he'd shot, he doesn't let the oppor-
tunity pass to introduce himself.
The Girl on the Train plays out in an
extended flashback as Danny relates his
version of events to a detective (played
by Jewish actor Stephen Lang) in an
interrogation room. Needless to say,
things didn't unfold quite the way Danny
had intended or expected. He believed
what he wanted to believe about the
girl's circumstances and leapt to conclu-
sions, and he's lucky the end of the line
wasn't, you know, the end of the line.
The Girl On the Train, which clocks
in at a tidy 80 minutes including credits,
should not to be confused with French
director Andre Techine's unsettling 2009
film (with the same title) inspired by the
sensational case of a non-Jewish woman
who alleged that Arab youths carved a
swastika on her stomach.
There's an epilogue to Morris' story,
however, that raises questions a good
deal more serious than anything engen-
dered by Danny's adventure. The movie
can't be construed as a form of Holocaust
denial — lowlifes who believe the geno-
cide didn't take place already have all the
"evidence" they need, anyway —but a sly
poke at just how eager we are to embrace
happy endings.
In that regard, The Girl on the Train
is a reverse twist on a fairy tale. ❑
The Girl on the Train is
scheduled to open Friday,
July 18, at Cinema Detroit,
3420 Cass Ave., in Midtown.
Producers Rebecca Reynolds
and Jim Carpenter will appear
in person for Q&As after film
showings on July 18 and 19. For
show times and other info, call
(313) 281-8301 or visit www.
cinemadetroit.com .
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