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. You'll find the trailer here.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. The Railway Man is out in the UK on New Year's Day. Lomax recorded his experience in prose - his book is a novelshelf staple in many homes - but it was the efforts of his wife, Patricia (Nicole Kidman), to engineer a reconciliation with Nagase that frames the story. Forgiveness seems a long way off at this point. Set partly after the fall of Singapore and partly in 1970s Berwick, it initially finds Lomax and his former comrades, including Stellan Skarsgård's Finlay, bearing the scars of their experiences. Thousands of soldiers, including young signaller and railway buff Lomax (Jeremy Irvine), were marched into captivity to work on the notorious Burma railway amid barely conceivable privations. Directed by Sydney-born Jonathan Teplitzky, The Railway Man is an Anglo-Aussie adapation that tackles the aftermath of the military disaster that befell the two Allied nations when Singapore surrender to the Japanese in 1942. These new posters introduce the film's dramatis personae, including tortured (in every sense) prisoner of war Eric Lomax - both young (Jeremy Irvine) and middle-aged (Colin Firth) - and his Japanese tormentor Takashi Nagase ( The Wolverine's Hiroyuki Sanada). And guess what? It's out on January 1, just in time to make us want to be a whole lot nicer to each other. A tale of redemption and forgiveness in the face of hard-to-imagine brutality, The Railway Man is like the world's most profound new year's resolution corralled into movie form.
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