The Railway Man

In the week that 12 Years a Slave offers a definitive take on slavery in America, it would be easy to overlook a quieter film examining a related topic from more recent history. The Railway Man tells the true story of Eric Lomax, a British soldier captured by the Japanese during the second World War and pressed into service building the Burma railroad.

We have been here before, of course. The appalling treatment handed out to the young Lomax (played with great sensitivity by Jeremy Irvine) will remind many of Alec Guinness's torments in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Lomax was beaten, waterboarded and starved. These sequences are maybe a little prettified, but some sense of the horrors does get through.

The film is, however, more interesting in its treatment of Lomax’s efforts to reconcile himself with the trauma in later life.

Colin Firth plays the elder Lomax as a quiet man whose post-traumatic stress (as we would now call it) manifests itself as an inability to engage properly with everyday life in postwar Edinburgh. An eager railway enthusiast, he finds some sort of comfort when he meets a recently divorced woman and allows himself to fall in love.

Nicole Kidman can't quite shake off the frozen glamour as Patti Lomax, but the relationship is nicely handled and finds some gentle humour in Eric's determined fascination with locomotive types and rail timetables.

A conversation with one of her husband’s wartime comrades (Stellan Skarsgård) helps Patti to appreciate the reasons for Eric’s introversion. Encouraged to open up, he travels to Asia and confronts a former tormentor, who now runs tours of the camp.

Whatever the truth of the story, the scenes in which Eric brandishes weapons and contemplates violent retribution feel just a little forced and melodramatic. But his final coming to terms with the past is extremely moving and utterly convincing.

This is a decent film about a very decent man.