The Railway Man

3 Stars (out of four)

I must admit, I was looking forward to this one.  The Railway Man promised to be a fascinating look into the life of a man who faces his nemesis head on in what looked to be a great confrontation.  Would there be revenge or forgiveness? And it does deliver.

Kind of.

The Railway Man is not really that complicated.  It is about a British WWII veteran who was captured when the British Army surrendered to the Imperial Japanese Army at the fall of Singapore.  Through a series of flashbacks, we see Eric Lomax, a young engineer who was captured and put to work on the railway line next to the Kwai River (the same river of another movie you may have heard of).  By using scavenged parts, Lomax builds a radio which eventually gets discovered and he is brutally questioned about it until the Allies arrive at the end of the war.  Intercut with the flashbacks is an older Lomax (Colin Firth), as he struggles with his memories of his wartime.  He meets his future wife, Patti (Nicole Kidman) be happenstance on a train and they fall in love.  She begins to see he has a severe case of PTSD.  She tries to help him, but he won't let her in.  She then seeks out his friend and fellow captive Findlay (Skellan Skarsgård) to tell her what happened, which he does.  He also sends a newspaper article with her detailing that one of their torturers is still alive.  Lomax goes back to Singapore to kill this man, but realizes he has to forgive if he is to move on.  In the postscript, we find the men became very good friends for over thirty years after that.

This movie is a little sad because it reaches for greatness and falls short.  It is not a bad movie by any means.  It just falls short.  Maybe it is due to editing or whatever, but you just can't connect with the characters.  You don't get to know any of them long enough to really understand and empathize with them.  You don't really experience the true horror of either the war or the suffering after.  It feels as if both subjects are only touched on superficially.  I never really felt the enormity of the suffering in either case as I did in more effective movies like Schindler's List.  Maybe it is a fault of the narrative with its cutting back and forth in time.  You don't really feel for anyone, so the emotional denouement at the end falls a little flat.  Nicole Kidman, in particular, is criminally underused.  She merely serves as the plot device for the narrative to unfold, so all she gets to do is sit and listen attentively to the storytellers as the director focuses on her beautiful blue eyes.  But in the end, this is a movie about the importance of forgiveness, and the last ten minutes are spellbinding.  A wonderful coda to a pretty brutal movie when all is told, but in the end, is too little, too late.  I would recommend it, but wait for the rental.