The Railway Man is an adaptation of the autobiography of Eric Lomax, a British World War Two veteran whose horrific experiences in Burma at the hands of the Japanese army were causing him severe post-traumatic stress even thirty-five years later. When Lomax discovers that the interpreter Nagase who facilitated his barbaric interrogation sessions is still alive and working at the same location he decides, with the encouragement of his new wife, to take the trip over to South-East Asia to face his demons and maybe achieve closure.
This is an earnest and worthy film that sets out to explore weighty themes of memory and reconciliation and if you’re looking for an actor who can deliver stiff-upper-lip repressed torment you’re not ever going to do better than Colin Firth but even so, I dunno…it all felt a bit fumbled and awkward to me. It’s structurally odd, starting as it does with a rather charming meet-cute between Firth and Nicole Kidman on a train, the light tone of which is absent from the rest of the film, before working its way through a rather contrived set of flashbacks showing Lomax as a young man being captured and set to work along with the rest of his unit on the infamously high-casualty Burma railway construction project. Presumably this format has been adopted so that the audience gets the information about Lomax’s past in the same sequence as his wife uncovers it but it might have been better for the flow of the film to have presented it in a straightforward chronological order. I was also distracted by Kidman’s haircut and over-precise enunciation and, slightly less trivially, by the decision to cast the defiantly Swedish-accented Stellan Skarsgard as Lomax’s former comrade-in-arms Finlay. Surely we’re not running that short of adequate Scottish actors? It all feels like someone should have run an iron over the script to minimise the wrinkles before they started shooting.
When, however, The Railway Man does get going and is allowed to get to the heart of its story it succeeds well in getting across the horrors of this particular corner of war. The scenes set in the 1940s are both vibrant and harrowing, presenting a convincing depiction of brave and resourceful men struggling to survive in a hostile situation. Jeremy Irvine does an excellent job as the younger Lomax who’s put through hell when his enthusiasm for making maps of trainlines is misinterpreted by his captors and some of the other actors look disturbingly malnourished. The film’s also pretty affecting later, when a stony-faced Firth returns to confront Nagase – you’re genuinely not quite sure how these scenes will play out. There’s enough good stuff in this film to make it worth your while if you’re interested in the subject, or just want a good cry – I was just left feeling that it was a shame that a fairly amazing true story had been put on the screen in such a convoluted fashion.
the tale of bengwy 