‘The Railway Man’: Incredible true story, even if director isn’t the best conductor
“The Railway Man” is one long therapy session revolving around one veteran’s struggle with PTSD that has plagued him for years following his incarceration in a World War II Japanese prison camp. It casts shades of “The Bridge Over the River Kwai” and “The Deer Hunter.” It’s also a true story based on Eric Lomax’s memoir of coming to terms with the demons of war that tormented him for much of his adult life.
The film begins tranquilly enough in a sleepy little English shore town in the 1980s, where at a men’s club meeting over beers, the somewhat reluctant Eric (Colin Firth) wistfully recounts his affection for Patti (Nicole Kidman), a women he met recently on a train. Trains and railways happen to be an obsessive hobby for Eric (thus the title). He’s also a kind and engaging soul, and soon enough he and Patti are moving toward marriage in all the most maudlin and pat ways possible. It’s here the film begins to feel dangerously like a large, sugary gobstopper, all fluff and no fire, but then the closet door opens and the skeletons start to pour out. Eric erupts in night terrors, he’s fiscally a disaster and sometimes he mutters to people who aren’t there.
It turns out that men’s club is what’s left of a battery of British soldiers taken prisoner by the Japanese during the fall of Singapore. Continue reading
For What it's Worth 