Film Review | The Railway Man

The world of cinema has historically made it a point to drum into our heads that ‘war is hell’ – all the while capitalising on its ‘heartening’ tendency to foment chiefly masculine camaraderie and provide some great action scenes, of course.

Evolving from all-out propaganda films which came out during actual war time, more recent attempts to depict the war zone on screen have, to be fair, at least tried to take a more questioning angle on things. Katheryn Bigelow’s Oscar-courting output perhaps offers up the clearest examples of this. 

Though strangely apolitical, her 2009 Best Picture winner Hurt Locker skimmed the jingoistic fat off the standard war time narrative to zoom in on the psychological damage suffered by members of a bomb-disposal unit stationed in Iraq… the really daring move being that in doing so, Bigelow didn’t shy away from showing that the job comes with its fair share of thrills – an adrenaline rush that’s as addictive as it is dangerous. 

A similarly amoral engine powered Sam Mendes’s Jarhead (2005), which depicted the Gulf War scene as one primarily dominated by boredom, its footmen progressively sidelined by technological developments. And though Bigelow’s follow-up to Hurt Locker – the 2012 Osama Bin Laden hunt-and-capture thriller Zero Dark Thirty – was deeply problematic on many levels, its gritty moral ambiguity at least left it open to debate. 

With the Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman-starring Railway Man, we’re on arguably less shaky, more traditional territory. But this tonally uneven look at the long-term effects of war is, for better or for worse, a mish-mash with some curious moments. 

Based on a true account, the film introduces us to the seemingly unassuming retiree Eric Lomax (Firth), who appears to be little more than a train enthusiast languishing in a sleepy seaside English town, occasionally spending time with old friends, his closest being Finaly (Stellan Skarsgård). His dull routine is given a lease of life when he meets Patti (Kidman). A chance encounter aboard a train blossoms into marriage, and the pair appear to be set for a life of domestic bliss. 

That is, until Eric’s wartime past returns to haunt him. We learn – in tandem with Patti, who gleans most of this from Finlay – that Eric was captured by the Japanese army in Singapore during World War II and along with his friends was tortured and forced to help build the Thai-Burma railway.

As Eric’s turmoil threatens to tear his marriage apart, he begins to see that the only way forward would be to face his torturers, be it for purposes of reconciliation… or revenge.

The primary, gaping problem with Jonathan Teplitzky’s film – adapted from Eric Lomax’s own autobiography – is that at the face of it, it appears to be two distinct films tacked together down the middle, with the glue still smelly and glistening. The following comparison might make the film seem stranger than it really is, but here goes: to me it felt like an unwitting mash-up of The Act of Killing (2013) and perennial British post-war romantic-repression drama Brief Encounter (1945). Viewers would be forgiven for assuming that the ‘present day’ narrative – detailing Eric and Patti’s courtship and marriage – takes place far earlier than the film’s 1980s setting, so archetypally ‘buttoned-up’ and British it is. This half of the film actually unspools quite nicely – a charming, even heart-warming, romantic prologue that sees two decent, shy people gradually warming to each other. 

It’s the other stuff that jars: in-the-trenches scenes that have to rely on Hollywood clichés to full develop due to time constraints, and a denouement that feels rushed because a key character (Hiroyuki Sanada’s Takashi Nagase) likewise has little time to be fleshed out enough for us to care for him.

It visibly struggles to make Lomax’s memoir film-friendly – shoehorning a far more explicit flavour of revenge than was evident in the source material – but despite its halting narrative and not entirely elegant mix of genres, the film still manages to portray the quietly simmering effects of war-time trauma, at least in its more finely crafted moments.

The performances certainly help, though the casting was hardly shocking or against-type. Firth has made English repression into an art form, and here he gets to throw in a couple of more ingredients into the pot by virtue of Eric’s trauma and latent aggression. But it’s perhaps Kidman who should really be commended for her efforts: all traces of Hollywood glamour are gone, and she succeeds in being both mousey and likeable (without having to resort to a prosthetic nose this time – see: The Hours). 

Lomax’s story has many angles – it’s just a shame that, in opting to somehow address all of them, Teplitzky never quite succeeds in doing justice to any. 

Railway Man will be showing at St James Cavalier between March 26-31 at 20:45.