"Jeremy Irvine is so like my dad it's uncanny. "On screen I got to see him as a young man – as he was before I met him, as he was even before he married my mum," she says. But seeing The Railway Man has prompted her to do so because, watching it, she felt as though the final piece of her lifelong mission to understand her father was being slotted into place. "I could see them thinking, where do you fit into all this?" she says.Ĭharmaine wasn't sure whether she wanted to tell the story of how she fitted in, the story that is missing from the film of her father's life and yet integral to it. So when Charmaine attended the film premiere in London earlier this month, she noticed a few puzzled looks when she told people she was Eric's daughter.
It has intense scenes of torture.Today Nan and Linda are dead, and Eric himself died last year. “The Railway Man” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). That modesty prevents “The Railway Man” from turning mawkishly sentimental once Lomax embraces the concept of forgiveness, and you can believe it’s possible. His performance is all the more convincing for its understatement. Later in the film, they signal a cold, murderous hatred, and even later, something more complex. Firth’s eyes convey a profound hurt barely camouflaged by a sardonic joviality.
#THE RAILWAY MAN SYNOPSIS CODE#
When Patti pressures his friend and former army buddy Finlay (Stellan Skarsgard) for an explanation, he breaks the veterans’ code of silence and reluctantly informs her of their wartime experiences. Only after Patti discovers that her husband suffers from terrifying nightmares does the story take shape.
The early scenes are a confusing hodgepodge that jumps around in time. Besides being an empathetic helpmate and angel of compassion who gently coaxes him to confront his demons, she barely exists. Kidman is radiant, her character is just a catalyst for Lomax’s recovery and redemption. With the idea of killing him, Lomax visits the museum and reveals his identity and undertakes his own interrogation.Īlthough Ms.
#THE RAILWAY MAN SYNOPSIS MOVIE#
The moral crux of the movie revolves around the news four decades later that Nagase (portrayed as an older man by Hiroyuki Sanada) is working as a tour guide in a Japanese war museum. Somehow he survives, although these gruesome scenes make you wonder how that was possible. Later, he endures a precursor of waterboarding that involves a hose attached to his mouth. At first, he is subjected to furious beatings. But his nightmare at the hands of Nagase (Tanroh Ishida), a sadistic Japanese interrogator, begins. When the radio is discovered, Lomax bravely takes the blame. In protracted flashbacks, Lomax, while helping construct the Burma Railway under slave-labor conditions, secretly assembles a crude radio through which the prisoners receive morale-boosting news. Jeremy Irvine plays Lomax as a young man in this drama based on Lomax’s memoir. That’s the way it is with all but the most nihilistic movies contemplating the horrors of war. If “The Railway Man,” like many films about combat, is reflexively antiwar, it unabashedly celebrates the nobility and courage of British soldiers. The movie alludes to two inspirations: “Brief Encounter” (its underdeveloped love story) and “The Bridge on the River Kwai” (its tale of forced labor by Allied prisoners of war).
The film, directed by Jonathan Teplitzky (“Burning Man”) from a screen adaptation of Lomax’s 1995 memoir, tells the true story of his brutal treatment by the Japanese after his capture in Singapore in 1942 and his determination to come to terms with it decades later. What place is there nowadays for a solid, old-fashioned movie about war, remembrance and reconciliation? That question occurred to me while watching “The Railway Man,” an unabashedly stodgy, high-minded film in the David Lean tradition (without the grandeur), starring Colin Firth as Eric Lomax, a British Army officer who served and suffered during World War II.
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