“The Railway Man” is a film that seems
destined for awards. However, its destiny (so to speak), at its best is on hold,
or even lost in the fever pitch of awards season. It has gained a total of zero
Golden Globe, Academy Award or Bafta nominations much to what can only be the
solemn sound of disappointment from the producers. Now, I am not stating here
in haste that films can only be “good” or “rotten” by the amount of accolades
it garners, in fact with ‘The Railway Man’ it is quite the opposite. If it had
been nominated it would be seen as quite a surprise (some might even
call it an upset) to seeing it sitting side by side with the likes of ’12 Years a Slave’ and ‘Gravity’. Yet it seems so award friendly, so
predictable at every turn and taking cautious steps that you almost forget
that, what starts, in part, as a startling shake up to the way of doing
Hollywood (and British) war movies, finds itself landing in unremarkable
territory.
Colin Firth stars as the troubled war veteran
Eric Lomax (with the film being based on his 1995 book of the same name). Eric,
or simply “Lomax”, lives quietly, bothering no one and shows an enthusiasm for
trains (though he does state later on that he is not, what we might call, ‘a
trainspotter’). On a seemingly
unremarkable journey he makes a rash decision (as with many movie decisions) to
switch, in the shortest possible window to catch a different train. Here, he
meets Patricia (a very British Nicole Kidman), who soon becomes his wife. So
far so Brief Encounter but the
similarities end there. Eric’s past comes back to haunt him, where is it is the
uncertainty of the future that keeps apart Trevor Howard and Cecilia Johnson in
David Leans film.
During the War, Eric, an officer stationed
in Singapore, becomes a prisoner of War at the hands of the Japanese, and
forced to work on the Thai-Burma Railway.
In his haste, the young Eric (here played by Jeremy Irvine at his very
best) formats a team with one purpose: to increase morale among the captured. However, once the Kempetai (the Japanese
Military Police Force) find a homemade radio, Lomax takes the blame, forcing
himself to be taken brutally aside from his comrades and subjected to
unimaginable torture. Later on his life, the scars seemingly never healed and,
with the help of fellow veteran Finlay (Stellan Skarsgard) and his wife, Eric
confronts his past head on, when he comes face to face with Takashi Nagase
(Hiroyuki Sanada), one of the men who subjected him to such cruelty.
The film was directed by Jonathan
Teplitzky, a native Australian, who had only directed a handful of Australian
pictures before this, approaches the material earnestly and composes shots that
could easily as influenced by Spielberg (if it reminds you of any War film it
wouldn’t be surprising if ‘Saving Private
Ryan’ and ‘War Horse’ came to
mind). A handful of the performances
(including Colin Firth and Jeremy Irvine) are among the best that they have
given, whereas others -most notably Nicole Kidman- are underwritten, underperformed,
strangely colder than expected.
What remains central to the idea of ‘The
Railway Man” is the notion of the aftermath and the psychological implications
of war on oneself and their loved ones. Eventually through the film, Eric finds
away (as unbelievable as it may sound) to forgive Takashi for what he has done,
with the films ultimate goal of forgiveness seeming to be its overall gain.
However, it can’t (as few films do) claim to work as Jean Renoirs La Grande Illusion does in humanizing
war and, more importantly, the enemy.
Instead, it is a tale of heroism and grief, and how unsurprisingly how often
the two are linked. By the end, Lomax and Takashi became very close friends and
through the process, both men were able to find some peace to their suffering. Whether
the film would have been able to issue some peace to these men will never be
known, since both died not long before production began.
However, against all odds (powerful central
performances, a harrowing true story of real bravery and humanity), the film runs
along conventional lines. The film is
told in a series of flashbacks: one during the war and the other many years
later where Lomax is confronting his past. The latter is tense and driven by
compellingly distraught Colin Firth, whereas the former simply follows a ‘band
of brothers’ as you have seen before, even if the enemy this time is given some
form of character instead being just a “faceless enemy’. Furthermore, for a
film that by the end is about the peace found by both men, the film is
decidedly one sided. Whether the film could have been saved, or better still,
elevated by more emphasis on Takashi will be something we can only ponder.
Would this approach have even been allowed? ‘The Railway Man’ is a film
that is simply to sanitized, unable to truly show the horrors of what is surely
one of the wars most unspeakable horrors.
