![]() With an inimitable editing style and a time-shifting script from “Millions” writer Frank Cottrell Boyce, the filmmaker places the audience in Lomax’s head as he tries to reconcile his torturous time in Burma with what promises to be a brighter future if only he can put his past behind him. While he lived to tell of his experience as an engineer in the British Army during World War II, Lomax continued to be haunted by his years spent in a Japanese prison camp where he and other POWs were forced to pave the way for the Imperial Army to bolster their military stronghold in Burma with the construction of a railway connecting it to Thailand.įor Teplitzky, who so vividly realized the past’s influence on the present in his last film “Burning Man,” which saw Matthew Goode deal with the personal demons of a man who recently lost his wife, “The Railway Man” is an opportunity to explore that theme on a grander scale when Lomax (played by Colin Firth primarily in his older years and Jeremy Irvine in his youth abroad) meets the woman he was meant to marry (Nicole Kidman) and yet cannot fully share his life with her since the horrors that he’s seen shouldn’t be shared with anyone. The mind wanders to David Lean once again.There are some remarkably complex compositions in Jonathan Teplitzky’s adaptation of Eric Lomax’s autobiography “The Railway Man,” not least of which is the one that makes up the man at its center. ![]() A whole movie could have been made out of that coda. The groundwork has been laid for a psychologically rich confrontation: How do you react when you’re staring a monster in the face? What do you do when that monster no longer looks the same? When offered the choice, how do you choose between revenge and forgiveness? That moment – that last question – is seemingly what the entire film has been building toward, but the filmmakers rush through it to get to a tidy, final-card coda. Where the taut thread of the thing slackens is when the two tracks converge to put fiftysomething Eric in the same room with his former torturer (Sanada). Garry Phillips’ cinematography, too, does equally breath-catching landscape work with seaside Northumberland and the jungles of Southeast Asia. (Eric is played as a young man by War Horse lead Jeremy Irvine, who radiates the same feeling of essential decency as Firth.) Screenwriters Andy Paterson and Frank Cottrell Boyce (who wrote many of Michael Winterbottom’s early films) adeptly shift the action back and forth between these two timelines, and the drama – exterior and interior – is engrossing in both tracks. In the WWII movie canon, the tragedy in Burma is a lesser-told story – excepting, of course, Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai.īased on the real-life Lomax’s memoir of the same name, The Railway Man runs on two tracks: the suspenseful dramatization of Eric’s PTSD and burgeoning romance with Patti in 1980, and flashbacks to his brutalizing experiences in the war, when he was repeatedly tortured by a Japanese officer named Nagase. The building of that line resulted in the deaths of more than 100,000 forced laborers, both civilian and POWs. He’s also violently tormented by his time as a prisoner of war, forced to work on the construction of the Burma Railway (alternately known, with devastating accuracy, as the Death Railway). ![]() What she soon learns is that that’s not the all of Eric. Patti’s too young to get the reference, but no matter: She falls for the gentle, erudite train enthusiast. Swiftly under her spell, Eric mentions Lean’s Brief Encounter, that seminal British romancer about a short-lived affair that begins and ends at a train station. Early in the film, Firth’s Eric Lomax, a British World War II veteran, shares a train compartment in 1980 with a lovely stranger named Patti (Kidman). It’s not the last time The Railway Man will recall – or explicitly call out – a David Lean picture. Colin Firth starts The Railway Man with a mustache, and the resemblance to Omar Sharif in David Lean’s war epic, Doctor Zhivago, is uncanny: same poetic heft, cleft chin, haunted eyes, and, yes, formidable mustache.
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