MOVIE REVIEW

‘Railway Man’ a darker look at WWII

5/23/2014
BY ROGER MOORE
ORLANDO SENTINEL
Hiroyuki Sanada, left, and Colin Firth in a scene from
Hiroyuki Sanada, left, and Colin Firth in a scene from "The Railway Man."

In Hollywood parlance, they “meet cute” — he stumbles into her first class seat on the train to Edinburgh.

She (Nicole Kidman) is a bit taken aback, but only for a moment. She offers, way too soon, that she’s “newly single.” He is bookish, awkward, slow to pick up on that. His encyclopedic knowledge of rail schedules gives away that he’s really into trains.

His small talk is pattering on about the history of every village, hamlet and landmark they pass by.

“Lancaster — known as the hanging town.”

He is smitten, she is intrigued. So it’s not really a coincidence when he runs into her on a homebound train some days later. Thus begins an adorable love affair and marriage.

But Eric has night terrors, paralyzing seizures of fear set off by a phrase, a song on the radio. Patti, who loves him, needs answers.

The Railway Man is about the horrors the people who lived through the “Keep calm and carry on” era didn’t talk about. This slow, uneven drama is a different sort of British prisoner of war movie. And even if it stumbles on its way to its fairly obvious, politically correct conclusion, it’s still worthwhile as a closer read on history than the decades of WWII movies that preceded it.

The Railway Man

Directed by Jonathan Teplitzky.

Written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and Andy Paterson.

A Weinstein Co. release, playing Levis Commons.

Rated R for disturbing prisoner of war violence.

Running time: 114 minutes.

Critic‘s rating: ★★★

Cast: Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman, Stellan Skarsgard, Jeremy Irvine, Sam Reid.

Because it’s good to remember that the construction of the bridge over the River Kwai wasn’t all British stiff upper lips, jolly-good-sport-playing head games with the Japanese, whistling the Colonel Bogey March.

For those who lived through it — prisoners of war worked to death as slave labor under inhuman conditions in the jungles of Thailand — it was a fetid, living hell.

Patti Lomax has to pry information out of Eric’s peers, the men who meet to not talk about what they went through together building that Thai-Burma Railway. Finlay (Stellan Skarsgard) is dismissive, but eventually he fills her in on what they all have been living with for 40 years (the movie is set in 1980).

In a long flashback, we see the shameful, seemingly premature surrender of Singapore, which Churchill called “the worst disaster” in British military history. The young radio operators, Eric and Finlay (played as young men by Jeremy Irvine and Sam Reid), pocket vacuum tubes and other radio parts as they line up to march into captivity. But once there, they see the awful consequences of getting caught doing that. They may be needed to keep the few machines the Japanese are using to build this rail line going. But beatings, torture, and summary executions are a constant threat.

Director Jonathan Teplitzky cast emaciated men to play many of the prisoners, and took care to get the Japanese right, too, historically. These weren’t the best and the brightest. They were small men, physically, mentally and spiritually, raised on a diet of rice and racism. And they behaved barbarically.

Shifts in attitude and tone are abrupt, as Firth plays Lomax as utterly broken, teetering on the brink of madness at one moment, lucid and calculating the next. Kidman is beguiling in the courtship scenes, given too little to play in the “Why won’t you talk to me?” ones.