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.

Statue of Colin Firth's Mr. Darcy rises from lake

LONDON (AP) — It's Colin Firth, but not as we know him. He's 12 feet (3.7 meters) tall and made of fiberglass.

A statue of brooding Mr. Darcy, the character played by Firth in "Pride and Prejudice" was installed Monday in London's Serpentine lake.

The figure shows Darcy emerging from the water in a soaked shirt, recreating a scene from the 1995 television adaptation of Jane Austen's novel.

The scene helped turn Firth into a sex symbol and is regularly voted among Britain's most memorable TV moments.

One of the sculptors, Toby Crowther, said the work took the lake scene as a starting point but also drew on other depictions of Austen's romantic hero.

The statue, which shows Darcy from the waist up, was placed amid the swans and swimmers in the Hyde Park lake to promote Drama, a new TV channel dedicated to British programs.

It is scheduled to go on display at several locations before being installed in a lake in Lyme Park, northwest England, where the scene was filmed. It will remain there until February.

Source: news.yahoo.com