Jonathan Teplitzky’s The Railway Man is an Oscar movie out of season. Lost in the doldrums between Academy Award consideration and the cacophonous din of the summer blockbusters, it’s a film abandoned, with enough tragedy, triumph, sweeping romance and factual historical weight to please an audience that won’t be looking for it come spring time. Pity, because although marketed shamelessly as awards bait, The Railway Man is actually a quiet, contemplative drama about the war after war, and surprisingly effective in its exploration of how different men deal with the trauma brought on by conflict.
Teplitzky’s film is an odd creature, less a hybrid of genres than a generous platter of them served in three courses. First is the romance, in which real-life veteran Eric Lomax (Colin Firth, reprising the dry Brit archetype he was often required to fall back on prior to A Single Man) awkwardly woos Patricia (Nicole Kidman). Second is the war movie, flashing back to a young Lomax (Jeremy Irvine) interned at the Thai-Burma Railway labour camp, in a Bridge on the River Kwai-esque story about small acts of defiance against Japanese oppression during WWII. Lastly is the revenge movie, in which Lomax and his abusive former captor Takashi Nagase (Hiroyuki Sanada) square off after years spent marinating in their individual shame.
This stop-start approach enlivens rather than leadens the film, though with Lomax as our one constant throughout, he inevitably wins the most affection from screenwriters Frank Cottrell Boyce and Andy Paterson, adapting from Lomax’s autobiographical novel. For that, the romance portion suffers. Kidman’s sole function is to forge events into motion, neglecting Patricia a backstory or personality. It doesn’t help that she spends most of her screen time in Teplitzky’s approximation of England as a grey seaside town trapped in eternal winter.
The other principal actors fare much better. Stellan Skarsgård offers solid, world-weary support as Lomax’s veteran friend, while Irvine banishes all memory of his snoozy turn in War Horse by delivering what could be the performance of the film, granting his own internalized display of anguish to his spot-on impersonation of Firth. If Irvine ultimately makes more of an impact it’s because of the stages of Lomax he’s allowed to demonstrate, tragically shifting from sprightly optimism to post-torture shock, while Firth takes over when Lomax is already ruined, a slumped figure subject to many dark days.
Visually, The Railway Man is a missed opportunity. Shot in Thailand and Teplitzky’s native Australia with lush, expansive greenery just out of focus, the director seems unaware of or unmoved by the natural beauty at his disposal. The modest photography shouldn’t distract, however, from the fact that a story of this size would be out of place on a smaller screen.
Lomax’s return to the East in the final act – to the eerie, largely intact camp and railway – sets The Railway Man up for a sinister revenge fantasy involving Lomax and the man who oversaw his torture decades prior, but Sanada’s tranquility expertly defuses Firth’s time-bomb rage as the film breezes into cathartic territory. It’s there that The Railway Man distinguishes itself from most other war movies, ultimately asserting that there is no glory in death, but hope in life.
As we lose the last of our veterans, so too do the stories leave us, and The Railway Man feels like the end of an era for WWII movies infused with the personal. The film’s finale, a tête-à-tête between Lomax and Takashi set in some unknown symbolic corridor between east and west, would be corny if the inherent truth in this understated film didn’t lend such scenes their lasting power. For a WWII flick that recognises its place as one of the last to have input from those who lived it, The Railway Man‘s message is crucially one of reconciliation.
