The film tells the story of his time as a prisoner, his much later marriage to his second wife Patti (Nicole Kidman), and his efforts to cope with what he most likely didn’t call post-traumatic stress disorder. It also tells the story of the reappearance in his life of a man named Nagase Takashi, who had been an interpreter for his captors and had told him, among other things, “You will be killed shortly.” He had thought bitterly of Nagase for many years, and when he learned Nagase was alive and had been working for reconciliation since the war, he barely knew how to react.
The structure of the film is calculated to push against its naturally romantic and redemptive arc. It opens with Eric and Patti’s meeting and chronicles their courtship in a sort of scrapbook of bits of film that are sometimes out of chronological order. It feels very much the way memory does, flitting not from one thing to the thing that happened next, but from one thing to the thing of which it reminds you.
When the flashbacks to the war begin, they’re choppy and don’t always begin and end where they structurally “should.” Back in the present, there’s a rattled, uncomfortable, not-right quality in the early scenes of the Lomax marriage, in which Eric is often seen lying down but shot from awkward angles, or even upside-down. And his memories of his imprisonment sometimes visually echo his seemingly happy marriage, as in a stunning shot of the young Lomax with his head resting perfectly still on a table as he recites a poem to himself. Despite its, for lack of a better word, British-ness, The Railway Man is more striking than pretty, more pebbly than elegant.
That young Lomax appears in the form of Jeremy Irvine, who was the lead in War Horse and makes a pretty convincing Firth-alike, particularly in his uncertain mouth and chin. He makes young Eric a persuasively terrified but honorable young officer, in a way that convincingly gives Firth’s restrained work most of its resonance. It’s believable that this is the same man, but many, many sleepless nights later.
Anyone who knows the story or has read the book will know that the third climactic act, in which Lomax ultimately decides what to do about his hatred of Nagase, is an invention. It takes a slower, more deliberative, more iterative story and condenses it into a single encounter.
But despite the fact that it’s not true, it feels honest. It’s certainly not a documentary version of the story, but it is, as it says it is, “based on a true story.” It’s based on Lomax’s later years in the same way a painting might be based on a lived experience; it’s not the thing itself but an attempt to represent the thing.
The Railway Man is doomed to sag a bit under its baggage of war and suffering and healing. It is the story it is; it is a story about a main character to whom it’s impossible to be unsympathetic no matter what he does, because what he’s endured is so thoroughly documented. It’s a story about trying to be a good person, and it features a man who is a good person, and whose wife is a good person. Its goodness, and its thematic interest in goodness, is a challenge to present meaningfully without Lomax coming off as self-congratulatory.
But the film keeps a sharp edge on his lingering anger, never suggesting either that he’s so good as to stop being angry or that his wife can fix his PTSD.
And in the end, forgiveness in the absence of love is a more interesting and curious idea than forgiveness in the presence of love. Why would you even contemplate showing any mercy to someone who had been merciless to you when that mercilessness was your only real bond? It’s a more philosophical question than why you would show kindness to a friend or spouse or parent who hurt you. It’s more pure: There’s no relationship other than pain. What’s the motivation for grace?
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