Not to divulge the plot developments for those who haven’t read Lomax’s book of the same name on which the film is based, suffice to say that THE RAILWAY MAN packs an emotional punch to move even the coldest heart so powerful you feel the pain, you feel burdens lift as demons are faced, you feel the forgiveness fill the screen and the room….and just watching, you are lifted and uplifted.During the Second World War, Eric Lomax is a British officer who is captured by the Japanese in Singapore and sent to a Japanese POW camp, where he is forced to work on the Thai- Burma Railway north of the Malay Peninsula. To watch Firth and Sanada in this emotionally nuanced dance is not only stirring but engrossing. However, it is Sanada as the older Nagase who matches Firth beat for beat providing a palpable emotional arc that goes from seeming ambivalence to mutual understanding and compassion. Ishida, bringing Nagase to life in the heat of the war and with the prime objective to build the railroad and make a name for himself with his superiors, delivers a tacit cold cruelty that pushes the boundaries of inhumane treatment to excess. Stellan Skarsgaard serves well as Eric’s former commander Finlay, giving the character an authoritative yet compassionate edge instrumental in the development of the film’s third act.Īs Eric’s cruel captor Takashi Nagase, Tanroh Ishida and Hiroyuki Sanada, as the young and older Nagase, respectively, embody the character. Kidman and Firth connect with a comfortable ease serving as a soft balance to the tortures of Eric’s past life. Frightening, yet impossible to turn away from Firth’s performance.Īs Eric’s loving and devoted wife, Patti, Nicole Kidman brings a quiet gravitas to Patti of which I wish we had seen more. Firth, meanwhile, makes the heart stop as he goes into seizure-like physical nightmares as a man suffering the post traumatic stress of his tortuous past.
Captivating with a blend of confidence and fear, Irvine is spellbinding. Those human qualities are delicately and expertly brought to life not only by Colin Firth as an aged Eric, but moreso, by Jeremy Irvine as Young Eric who should garner Academy attention come Oscar time. We also see the strength of the human spirit, the resilience and hope. We see his future being shaped by the tortures inflicted upon him. We feel the pain of each horror inflicted on Eric.
Set in the 1980’s, Teplitzky relies on vividly lensed flashbacks of Eric’s time as a Japanese POW that assail the senses with light, texture, saturated color and sound. And now decades later, those tortures are as real as ever. She also knows that the only way to heal is to face the past, confront it, and after pleading with one of Eric’s former brothers-in-arms, she learns of the horrors all of the men endured as prisoners that is, up to a point, as Eric has never spoken to anyone of what happened to him, what tortured he endured, when he was taken from the group and imprisoned alone, in a cage, in a dark room.
A former nurse, Patti realizes this is a result of whatever happened in the war. But Eric tells Patti nothing about his past and it is only after they’re married that she sees him start to break down, become more reclusive, violent, confused.
While serving as radio man for a British contingent stationed in the Far East, on capture as prisoners of war, Eric and his entire unit, as well as others, are forced to work as slave labor, building the Thailand-Burma Railway aka Death Railway.Ī loner for the past 40 years, serendipity plays a hand when Eric meets Patti on a train. Seeming a mild-mannered slightly odd duck with an obsession for railroads and timetables, it doesn’t take long for us to learn that Lomax is a bit damaged from his experiences in the war, experiences of which he doesn’t want to speak, experiences which terrorize him day and night. Based on the true story of former WWII Japanese prisoner of war Eric Lomax and script adaptation by Frank Cottrell Boyce and Andy Paterson, director Jonathan Teplitzky brings us Lomax’s harrowing story of survival under the most brutal of circumstances, and the power of redemption and forgiveness.
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