Old Yorker

  • The Railway Man

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jonathan Teplitzky (2013)

    Its delayed release was a sign that something had gone wrong with this screen adaptation of Eric Lomax’s autobiography.  Lomax was a British prisoner of war in Japan:  captured in Singapore, he was forced to work on the Thai-Burma Railway and tortured by the Japanese military police (the ‘Kempeitai’).  The Railway Man had already been the subject, on its publication in 1995, of a documentary by Mike Finlason (Enemy, My Friend?) and a BBC television drama (Prisoners in Time, with John Hurt as Lomax).  Even so, this is a story of psychological trauma, deep-seated and long-suppressed, which is eventually resolved and dispelled in forgiveness.  In other words, it’s a kind of movie story – especially a kind of true story – that tends to win prizes, or at least nominations for prizes.  The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2013 but there seems to have been no rush to get it into American cinemas to qualify for this year’s awards season.  It arrived in Britain earlier this month – soon enough to get BAFTA nods, though none materialised.  The critical reception has been lukewarm.

    Jonathan Teplitzky and the screenwriters, Frank Cottrell Boyce and Andy Paterson, turn something that really happened into something largely incredible.  The film is set in the early 1980s with flashbacks, of course, to World War II.  The recently retired Eric Lomax is presented as a fixture at an army veterans’ club in North East England but he’s a solitary fellow even in the company of the other ex-soldiers there.  A railway enthusiast, Eric finds his life turned upside down when, on a train journey, he meets and falls instantly in love with a younger woman.  Within a few screen minutes, they’re man and wife.   Eric Lomax died at the age of ninety-three in October 2012, when the making of The Railway Man was well underway; his widow Patti, seventeen years his junior, survives him.  It may have been out of respect to the Lomaxes that the script omits any mention of the actual circumstances of their marriage.  The Eric of the film comes across not only as emotionally isolated but as a confirmed bachelor.  The real Lomax, in 1982, left Nan, his wife of thirty-seven years, for Patti, whom he married the following year.   Eric and Nan had three children:  one, the only boy, died in childbirth.  Did Eric’s ending of the marriage mean he was estranged from his two daughters?   Had his relationship with Nan broken down because he couldn’t come to terms with what had happened to him during the war?   Whatever the answers to these questions, the basis of the Lomaxes’ screen marriage is incomprehensible.  You learn soon enough that Eric can’t tell Patti about his experiences as a POW but it’s not evident she knows anything about his past at all – that she troubled to ask, before they tied the knot, what he’d been doing for the first sixty years of his life.

    It’s one thing to rewrite real people for the purposes of dramatising their story, another to make changes without thinking through their implications.  That’s what looks to have happened here – and in more ways than the above.  Eric Lomax, born in Edinburgh in 1919 and who left school at sixteen, has turned into the unarguably English, rather posh Colin Firth.  Patti Wallace, a Canadian, is played by Nicole Kidman with an RP English accent that’s effortfully though successfully maintained.  Stellan Skarsgård, as Lomax’s fellow POW, another habitué of the veterans’ club, makes no attempt to conceal the fact he’s Scandinavian – so why still call him Finlay?   The trio are an awkward combination but Jonathan Teplitzky’s arrhythmic direction is a bigger problem.  Eric’s decision, in the light of Finlay’s suicide, to return to the scene of his torture and confront one of his captors, Nagase Takashi, is realised instantly.  You don’t know if Patti is aware of what her husband has decided to do, or, if she does, what she thinks about it.  Eric is so traumatised that he imagines, even on British Rail, Japanese soldiers popping up in the English countryside:  his travelling to Asia is so abrupt that, for several minutes, I wondered if this too was a fantasy.  Perhaps Eric Lomax really did walk into the war museum where Nagase Takashi worked as a guide, after it had closed for the day, and hold his former tormentor captive, but this episode is staged and written in a way that makes it ridiculous.  (Takashi: ‘The museum will open again tomorrow, sir’, Lomax:  ‘I’m afraid this won’t wait until tomorrow’, etc.)  The flashbacks to Lomax’s POW ordeal aren’t so badly directed but, since the audience already knows what Eric’s problem is, the extended description of what he went through as a prisoner begins to verge on the tasteless.

    In the brief sequences that describe Eric’s first meetings with Patti, Colin Firth is nuanced and engaging – but engaging as a reticent bachelor who suddenly finds himself in love:  there’s no suggestion of Eric’s colossal backstory.  Over the course of the film, Firth’s acting is highly variable.  I can’t help thinking that his trademark suppression of deep emotion, which several reviewers have praised again in writing about The Railway Man, says something about the actor’s  lack of expressiveness – whenever he relies, as he does here, on trying to show what’s going on inside.  It’s no coincidence that his greatest successes have come in A Single Man and The King’s Speech, where he wears his heart on his face[1]. There are a few moments in The Railway Man when something is going on behind Firth’s eyes but I didn’t think he brought off the crucial meetings with Takashi, who’s well played by Hiroyuki Sanada.  Jeremy Irvine, as the POW Eric, is almost uninterruptedly in extremis but he’s good at anticipating Firth’s Lomax.  Tanrosh Ishida, as the young Takashi, is effective too.  Nicole Kidman can’t be blamed for seeming uneasy with a role as thinly written as Patti Lomax; as often happens in these circumstances, rather a lot of acting yields very little characterisation.  Still, Kidman gives an intelligent, modulated performance, in spite of the fundamental implausibility of Patti’s situation, as presented here.  The music by David Hirschfelder almost always seems unnecessary.   It’s frustrating, given what really happened, that The Railway Man isn’t better:  legends on the screen at the end of the film summarise the friendship that developed between Lomax and Takashi, and which lasted until the latter’s death.

    14 January 2014

    [1] See note on The King’s Speech for a suggestion of why Firth’s salient misery is more persuasive in that film than in A Single Man.

  • Hamlet for Schools (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Tania Lieven (1961)

    Part of the BFI’s ‘UnLOCked’ season, which links to this year’s ‘World Shakespeare Festival’.  (Even though this is a showcase year for Britain, the timing of the Festival is odd, only four years before the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.)  It was frustrating that neither the programme note – a brief run through the relatively few Shakespeare productions on British commercial television – nor the introduction to the film supplied more information about the production.  When I got home and looked it up online, I discovered there were two versions of Hamlet produced by Associated Rediffusion in the autumn term of 1961 – each with a different director and cast and screened, on either side of the half-term holiday, as five weekly episodes.   This raises questions I don’t know the answers to – such as what proportion of schools had television in 1961, and what English teachers thought about pruning the text to fit the programme schedule. This Hamlet, with the five episodes stitched together in a recording retrieved as part of the discoveries in the American Library of Congress in 2010, runs for 123 minutes including closing credits (the most obvious cuts include the opening scene on the ramparts).   The BFI monthly programme booklet and note for the screening made a lot of how much playing Hamlet meant to Barry Foster, and the screening was introduced by his widow Judith Shergold, a likeably unconfident public speaker.  I hope it was a slip of the tongue when she described how her late husband had tried unsuccessfully to track down the recording and ‘the BBC said they knew nothing about it’.

    I like to think it was consideration for the needs of people preparing for exams, as well as limited technical resources, that caused Tania Lieven and her cast to put themselves at the service of the text rather than try to dazzle the audience.   There’s a good deal of conscientious but unremarkable acting from the likes of Neville Jason (Horatio), Peter Copley (the Ghost) and David Sumner (Laertes).  Jennifer Daniel’s very limited Ophelia is more of a problem.  Judith Shergold talked amusingly of Barry Foster’s anxiety about his crinkly hair and how, on the advice of a friend, he had it cut and, in effect, ironed for the occasion.   This was a smart move:  there are some wigs in this production that are not just unconvincing but evidently ill-fitting:  you notice both Laertes and Claudius checking their hairpiece is still in place at very unlikely moments.   (I assume the episodes screened were pre-recorded but that the recording itself was a single take.)   Michael Aldridge is pretty good as Polonius, although the character is richer when an actor gives you the idea that Polonius believes himself to be highly sophisticated (as Oliver Ford Davies did in the television adaptation of the David Tennant Hamlet a year or two ago).

    Barry Foster is a vigorous Prince:  there’s never a suggestion with him that the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.  (William Russell played Hamlet in the other – and preceding – Rediffusion production.)   Foster’s appetite for the role is obvious and appealing but he’s very self-aware.  The soliloquies (although I’d dozed off briefly at ‘To be or not to be’ time) are delivered in incantatory style and somewhat overwrought, even though Foster uses a fine voice to sonorous effect.  As a result, when Hamlet is telling the players how to perform, you feel this is a case of do as I say, not as I do.  Foster is much better when he forgets himself and plays to another actor instead of the camera.  He’s especially good with the two women.  The closet scene is excellent, and the Freudian edge to Hamlet’s relationship with his mother comes across strongly – not least because Patricia Jessel, without the head-dress this Gertrude usually wears and her hair down, looks so much closer in age to Foster here.  (There’s an effective resonance in the closeness between Gertrude and Hamlet in the final death scene.)   Sydney Tafler, with his long experience in cinema, is unsurprisingly more relaxed than most of the others in front of the camera.  Because he became typecast as a spiv in cinema, the other elements of his performance as Claudius are surprising, however – and a pleasant surprise.   In the early scenes, he gives the new king a believable shallow charisma; later on, Tafler’s throttled voice gets across the impacted guilt inside Claudius.  The players themselves are too hammy to be alarming but Tafler’s reactions to ‘The Mouse Trap’ are good.

    I enjoyed this Hamlet more than I would ever expect to enjoy the play on stage or even on film if it were done now.  It made me realise what an old-fashioned and narrow idea I have of ‘genuine’ Shakespeare – doublet and hose.  I found the absence of tricksiness a real relief.  ‘I’ve seen it before:  he dies’, is what John Osborne’s mother is alleged (by the son who loathed her) to have said, when Osborne asked if she was coming to see a production of Hamlet in which he was appearing.  For the most part, the actors in this Associated Rediffusion version allow the meaning of the lines to come through clearly and afresh:  the persistence of death in those lines, in Hamlet’s lines especially, shocks and thrills.

    5 July 2012

Posts navigation