Butler's Cinema Scene

Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman

“THE RAILWAY MAN”  My rating: B- (Now showing at the Glenwood Arts)

116 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Knowing that the story told in “The Railway Man” is more or less true is essential to appreciating Jonathan Teplitzky’s film.

For there are moments here – lots of them – when I felt I’d been conned into a clumsily structured, overly earnest “lesson” film.

The story begins with a bit of deceptive  romance.  Sixtyish Eric Lomax (Colin Firth) is a British bachelor who loves trains.  He’s not a trainspotter, he emphasizes, but a “train enthusiast.”  This being 1980 in jolly olde England, there are plenty of trains to take pleasure in.

On one such train he runs into Patti (Nicole Kidman), a recently divorced woman whom he helps plana trip to Scotland.  Eric may not be terribly adept socially, but he apparently has the schedule of every train in Britain committed to memory.

As they cruise through the countryside, Eric regales her with bits of local history.  One town, he notes, was where the film “Brief Encounter” was shot…a nice observation since Eric and Patti seem to be living their own version of that classic movie.

So…”The Railway Man” is a sweet,  late-in-life love story?

Jeremy Irvine

Hardly.  Eric and Patti do wed, but she soon realizes not all is well with her husband. Eric is haunted by his experiences in World War II as a prisoner of the Japanese. Periodically the film flashes back to the war where Eric (now played by Jeremy Irvine) was a slave laborer, building a railway through the Thai/Burma jungle.

Eric won’t talk about any of this, and a desperate Patti approaches Eric’s best friend and fellow POW Finlay (Stellan Skarsgard) for insight. Finlay reveals a little, but not much…he notes that he and Eric are just one of an entire generation of former soldiers still nursing psychic wounds.

“The Railway Man” is evenly divided between the “contemporary” scenes and the flashbacks, the latter featuring a fairly predictable menu of Japanese atrocities. Young Eric and his pals manage to assemble a rudimentary radio from scavenged materials, and risk much by using it to find out how the war is going. The news that Hitler is on the run helps make their current circumstances tolerable.

When the radio is discovered, Eric takes the blame and is tortured mercilessly.  A young Japanese officer (Tanroh Ishida) serves as the interpreter during his brutal interrogations, and now, 40 years later, it is that young man’s face that Eric sees as the source of all his mental anguish.

I rather like the way Firth and Irvine play the same character at different stages of life. And Firth is really good at finding the unspoken anguish behind Eric’s eyes.

Yet “The Railway Man” feels a bit perfunctory. Given the hugely human elements in Eric Lomax’s story, the film should be emotionally devastating. I found myself standing apart from it.

Happily, the movie is redeemed in its last chapter, when Lomax travels to Thailand to find and kill his long-ago tormentor, only to find not the fiend he had envisioned but yet another casualty of war.

| Robert W. Butler