No Matter How You Spin It-War Is Hell-In This Year Of The 100^th Anniversary Of Armistice Day Just Ask A Veteran-Colin Firth And Nicole Kidman’s “The Railway Man” (2013)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Senior Film Critic Sam Lowell

The Railway Man (railway automatically telling you this is a British film), Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman, 2013

Sometimes a name of a place, especially a place when war or some other catastrophe passed though will make your gut churn up, make a tear come to your eye when you think about that name. The various Holocaust death camp sites in Europe come to mind as do places like My Lai in Vietnam. In my family the Burma Highway comes to those emotional senses. My grand uncle, Frank, had been one of those who died working, no, no, no, not working slaving to produce what the Japanese in World War II were trying to do in the infested jungles of Southeast Asia to get a railroad track laid as a shortcut to from point A to point B in their determination to subject all of Asia to their will. I never knew that uncle having been born after news that he had died on the highway, news that his body had been recovered from a mass grave along that highway came our family’s way. Would not have had a chance to know him even if he had not died that endless death since he had gone back to Ireland when he could not find work in America during the 1930s and then when Ireland did not prove to be any better than America fatefully migrated to Australia. Migrated just at the wrong time since the Japanese were raising hell in all the British possessions and threatened Australia. He joined one of the regiments that would head to Singapore to support the British defense there just before they surrendered to the Japanese. And from there to the death highway. (Why an Irish nationalist, and he was, wound up defending the Brits is a story I never got from my Grandmother Riley since you could not mention Frank’s name without her crying and so I stopped doing so.)

That brings us to the film adaptation of Eric Lomax’s autobiography The Railway Man. The story of his horrible torturous experiences on that same railway that my grand uncle perished. In this case Lomax, played by stiff upper lip Colin Firth, was an officer in the British Engineers who got caught in the same round-up when the British surrendered in Singapore and wound up transported to the Malay Peninsula. Unlike my grand uncle we know what happened to Lomax in great detail from the film. As an engineer he was forced to work on designing the best route through the dense jungle for the Japanese. Lomax though was an industrious sort, a tinkerer, a harmless tinkerer with radios and a love of railroads. He made the almost fatal mistake of building a radio set which the Japanese found out about and assumed was some sort of communication device to get messages to their enemies. No, all Eric was doing was attempting to keep morale up, his own and that of his comrades, by getting information from the BBC International service. For that, which he took sole responsibility for, he was mercilessly tortured by the Japanese military police, especially one Nagase. Eventually the British prisoners, those who survived physically, were liberated by Allied forces.            

That experience as one could expect was a life-long psychic wound that never was either far from the surface or something that he was able to get over as the film edges forward. Enter some thirty years later Patricia, played by fetching Nicole Kidman, met on a train heading toward Scotland. They got along, got along very well although Patricia was unaware of the effects of that prison camp experience until after they   had been married and he displayed symptoms of the nightmares that haunted his dreams and incapacitate him to the point on physical withdrawal, Through an Eric friend who also went through the Burma railway experience she learned what had happened to her husband. Through that same friend who would eventually commit suicide over his own memories Eric found out that the torturer Nagase was still alive and well and had never been prosecuted for war crimes committed during the prison tortures. After his friend commits suicide and urged on by Patricia, he went to Asia to confront Nagase who had been working as a museum guide at the very place where he had been a torturer.               

They met and Eric at that point was determined to get his well-deserved revenge that the Allies had not been able to do. But upon meeting and after talking although it was a close thing Eric decided not to do the murder he had in his heart. This an example of so-called reconciliation between the transgressor and his victim. In the end as we find out through the afterword the pair became lifelong friends. What I ask though is where was justice for my grand uncle-and relief for my poor grandmother.