If the new Jennifer Aniston/Clive Owen film is half as good as the book, it’ll be … well, half as good.
James Siegel’s DERAILED is the story of an affair – an all-too-brief one, as it turns out – between a very married (though not to each other) advertising creative director Charles and stockbroker Lucinda. They meet on the train (hence the title) during their morning commute. Flirtation leads to lunch. Lunch leads to drinks. Drinks lead to sex. Sex in a cheap hotel downtown, where their post-coital bliss is rudely interrupted by a thug who robs them and then rapes Lucinda repeatedly, with Charles unable to do anything but be forced to watch.
They both live to tell about it, yet tell no one, out of fear of exposing their infidelity to their respective spouses. But the criminal’s not through with them, calling and showing up on their doorstep to demand some hush money. And one request turns to two. And out of desperation, Charles digs himself deeper and deeper into a hole so large that it’s not just his marriage at stake, but his job and the lives of his family. His situation grows so seemingly inescapable that DERAILED could almost be classified as horror; you really feel uneasy for the guy, even if his character isn’t totally sympathetic.
When first released in 2003, DERAILED received mostly positive notices which cited a big twist. That “twist” can be easily guessed by anyone who’s read a thriller before; it’s the oldest trick in the book, though the discovery of it is handled nicely. One can argue there’s a secondary twist toward the end, but it’s really more of a convenient cop-out, with Siegel perhaps unable to write his characters out of that fine mess. Neither of these missteps detracts from the fact that DERAILED is a suspenseful and easily digested page-turner.
As a real-life ad exec, Siegel makes Charles’ work life ring true, even if other details aren’t as concrete (Silly Putty lifts newspaper comics, Jimmy, not Play-Doh). I don’t know how creating 30-second commercials led him to write 300-page tension ratcheters, but he does a fine job. Whether the movie can replicate that remains to be seen. I fear Aniston is gravely miscast as the female lead, but this isn’t a film review site; I just like to pick on her. But everyone knows the book is always better than the movie, right? I found this one at Dollar Tree – a mint-condition hardcover for only a buck, and the experience was easily worth 10 times that.
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