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.