The Railway Man, review

The Railway Man is a touching tribute to the man Eric Lomax, says Tim Robey.

The Railway Man: Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman as Eric Lomax and his wife Patti 

Dir: Jonathan Teplitzy. Stars: Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman, Jeremy Irvine, Stellan Skarsgård


"His whole life has been trains," we're told by the best friend of Eric Lomax (Colin Firth), the late memoirist and former British Army officer who relayed his experiences as a PoW in his book The Railway Man. At the beginning of Jonathan Teplitzy's square, soulful adaptation, which is screening at the Toronto Film Festival, he meets his future wife Patti (Nicole Kidman) in a first-class carriage, through the happenstance of knowing how to beat his own delayed train with a switch of connection. On one condition – he has to lose his off-putting moustache – they tie the knot, but Lomax, in one of Firth's reliable portraits of testy British reserve, is still at war, at least in his head: he's never come to terms with the treatment he received from the Japanese after the fall of Singapore.



There's no knocking Firth, and Kidman – whose scared demeanour and accent slightly recall her performance in The Others – is an expert coaxer: it falls to Patti to help Eric unlock the memories of this trauma and nudge him towards closure. The film's main problem, in a way, is a comparable starchiness: you could think of it as The Reader cinema – polished and diagrammatic, with a slightly nervous degree of dutiful prestige. Firth steps back for the second act, and the lengthiest flashbacks are channelled instead through the recollections of old buddy Stellan Skarsgård, who recalls their attempts to fabricate a contraband radio, the discovery of which had the young Lomax (Jeremy Irvine) beaten to near-death by their Japanese overseers.


Irvine, who's essentially inhabiting a mini-Bridge on the River Kwai in these bits, proves the film's freshest component: he's touching and credible, with a surprisingly deft line in impersonating a young Firth. Dividing the film's recollections of war into multiple perspectives is a mistake, though – it makes them too impersonal, too generic. Firth's return, many years later, to seek penitence from his foremost captor and torturer, Takashi Nagase (Hiroyuki Sanada), also lacks the dramatic voltage it intends, perhaps because Teplitzky's gliding camera style is too fond of needlessly distancing gimmickry, such as shooting people's faces upside down, and tends to embalm the material. The result is a film that does perfectly respectable justice to Lomax's ordeal, without ever making a strong case for itself as independently stirring art.

Source: telegraph.co.uk