The Railway Man

Jonathan Teplitzky's The Railway Man put me through a wide range of emotions.  I was involved, heartbroken, angry, and ultimately joyous as the film drew to a close.  This is a wonderful film based on a true story so good, I'm surprised it wasn't adapted into a movie sooner.  At least it has now, and the wait has most certainly been worth it.

Colin Firth stars and gives a riveting performance as Eric Lomax, a meek and quiet man whose main love in life happens to be trains.  But then, one day, he meets a woman (on a train, naturally) who opens his heart for the first time.  She is Patti (Nicole Kidman, charming and fragile here), and there is an instant connection.  The opening 15 or 20 minutes of the film is fairly lighthearted, and if you knew nothing about the film walking in, you might think you were watching a charming British romance story.  Little by little, however, Patti (and we the audience) discover that Eric is hiding and battling some very powerful personal demons that stem from his time as a POW in a Japanese prison camp, during his time as a young man in the British military in World War II.

At first, Eric refuses to share any of his story with his new wife, wanting to leave the past behind him.  But he keeps on being haunted by hallucinations of his former tormentors, and even strikes out violently at innocent people.  As Patti digs into her husband's past by speaking to some of his former military friends who were in the camp along with him, the film's second plot begins, and we flashback to when Eric is a young man (played by Jeremy Irvine).  When he and his fellow soldiers are captured during the height of the war, they are sent by train to a prison camp in Thailand.  There, they are faced with brutal working conditions by the Japanese soldiers who run the camp.  In order to keep up the morale of his fellow prisoners, Eric gets the idea to build a radio out of stolen mechanical parts, so that he can listen to broadcasts from the BBC about the progress of the war.

Eventually, the radio is discovered, and the Japanese soldiers believe that it is a device that Eric and his fellow prisoners are using to communicate with the enemy.  Eric tries to tell them that the device can only receive signals, not send them out.  The prison guards do not believe him, and force him to endure a variety of different tortures in order to get the answer they want to hear out of him.  These scenes are harrowing and brutal, and it brings forth a tricky question for us, the audience, once the flashbacks end, and we return to the main story - What do we want Eric to do when he discovers that his main tormentor from the camp is still alive, and living a happy and normal life?  How does Eric want to confront this when his past is literally standing right in front of him, and most importantly, how do we want him to confront it?

The Railway Man forces us to face Eric's pain and torment head-on, so that when he sees the man he associates with his anguish leading a group of tourists on a tour of an attraction, we feel just as enraged as he must at first.  The man in question is Takeshi Nagase (Hiroyuki Sanada), and when the two men do finally meet face-to-face, it does not take Takeshi long for him to remember who Eric is, and what he has come for.  The tension in these final scenes are some of the most palpable as I have found in any film so far this year.  When the movie does arrive at its outcome, it is tricky, and in the wrong hands, could have been deadly.  But Teplitzky finds the right tone, and ends things on just the right note.  I can't really go into any detail, risk of spoiling the ending, but I will say that your enjoyment and suspense will probably be determined by not following the true story of Eric Lomax too closely before watching the film. 

This is a story that easily could have been told through heavy melodrama, and while there certainly are some moments of that, the performances of all the actors really do ground the film in a sense of reality.  The movie really does keep on finding the right tone just about all the way through, so that we are never taken out of the story.  There are also some seriously heartbreaking, yet subtle moments, such as the sequence where we see the young Eric being rescued, returned home a celebrated hero, and then finds his loving mother waiting for him, only for a quick cut to reveal that it was all a dream.  We later learn that when Eric was eventually actually rescued and returned home, his mother was already dead.  This sequence in particular uses little to no dialogue, and is told pretty much entirely through imagery.  It's a powerful moment in a film filled with many.

This is the kind of film you usually see around December, when all the big award hopeful movies hit theaters.  The fact that it's being released this early in the year most likely means that the studio has little faith in it.  That's a shame, because this truly is a beautiful, heartbreaking, and uplifting film that puts you through the emotional ringer.  When you walk out, you not only want to read Eric Lomax's autobiography that inspired the film, but you also can't help but wonder how you would handle things in his situation.

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