Life and death on the Burma Railway

The Railway Man (P15)

Running time 116 minutes

Rating:***

Today, there are only a handful of frail old men alive, who when the subject of railways comes up, tend to fall silent and think their own thoughts.
For these men, assuming that they would want to, going to the cinema to watch The Railway Man could be more than they could bear.
The film is the real-life story of Eric Lomax, captured by the Japanese in 1942 when they overran Singapore by the simple plan of coming up behind the British, and who then spent three years building the Burma Railway, known less than affectionately as the Death Railway.
Eric, who died in 2012, aged 93, was beaten, starved, tortured and traumatised in those years, watching his friends die of disease, brutality and despair. And in that time, he learned how to hate his captors, especially one man who watched him throughout the process.
The Railway Man is the story of Lomax’s experiences on the railway and his subsequent meeting with his watcher.
The early years Lomax is played by Jeremy Irvine. Colin Firth portrays him in later life, while Eric’s wife, Patti, who somehow managed to cope with a man twisted and shattered by his war experience, is played by Nicole Kidman. Hiroyuki Sanada takes the roles of the Japanese nemesis Nagase.
The Railway Man is a curiously underplayed film that, if you bear in mind the British Board of Film Classification’s tendency to allow quite brutal scenes in 12a films, is not especially violent in its portrayal, although there is one scene in which a Japanese guard beats Eric with a stick, causing serious injury, and later the prisoner is subjected to what the Americans later call coyly “waterboarding”.
Both incidents are likely to linger long in the mind. Perhaps wisely the director Jonathan Teplitzky doesn’t go fully into the three years of unrelenting misery and punishment meted out to the prisoners of war. And yet, without this, the traumatised Eric post war, with his homicidal determination to confront Nagase – seem somehow diminished and muted.
This is a film about redemption, for Lomax and also for Nagase, who later became his great friend. It is also a story about how hard it is to hate forever, even though there are plenty of examples in the world today where people appear to be working hard to disprove the premise.
Firth offers a typically British approach to the portrayal of Lomax, one of bottled-up anger and fear which turns him into a reclusive traveller on – ironically – railways back in Britain, where he first meets Patti, played with equal restraint by Kidman.
Perhaps the most demanding role was that of Nagase, a product of his time who later recognised what evil had been done in the name of his country.
The Railway Man is a good history film, and it is a good film about human nature and the impact we can have upon one another’s lives.
The gentlest touch of additional cinematic dramatisation may just have lent the movie even more impact.