![]() (Firth is a tad too young to be playing the 60ish Lomax, but he’s very good at balancing manly reticence regarding talking about emotions and letting us see Eric’s terrible pain.) Still, to our eyes, this all looks very sudden: Was he having such violent episodes before, or is this a new development? If Patti, his new wife, has witnessed anything like this prior to the first one that ends up onscreen, on their actual wedding day, we have no indication of it. In 1980, older Eric is having fits and behaving in odd ways, such as physically attacking bill collectors who come to the door, things that we today recognize as PTSD flashbacks set off by stress. The first half of the film flips back and forth between Eric in 1980 and the much younger Eric (Jeremy Irvine: Great Expectations, Now Is Good) in Singapore in 1942, when as a communications officer in the British Army, he was taken prisoner by the Japanese as they captured the city. The script, by Frank Cottrell Boyce ( Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, Code 46) and Andy Paterson, takes probably too long in setting everything up and yet also, weirdly, seems to overlook some dramatically important things. The major problem with The Railway Man The Movie is that it almost entirely ignores this amazing thing that makes the story worth telling. The notion that we petty, violent human monkeys are capable of laying aside our trauma and forgiving those who have done us extraordinary wrongs is a remarkable one… all the more so because it actually sometimes seems possible to pull off. ![]() The forgiveness thing is part of what earned the true memoir by Eric Lomax - the guy Firth is playing here - its acclaim (it won the NCR Book Award and the PEN/Ackerley Prize for autobiography), and since South Africa was so incredibly successful with its Truth and Reconciliation Commission after apartheid ended, it’s been a hot topic among political and culture geeks. It’s a story about PTSD - though from a time before it was called that - and an urge for revenge that turns into a desire for reconciliation and forgiveness. The Railway Man is not a sweet little romance. “I’m not a trainspotter,” he assures her - and us - not that most prototypical of British nerds “I’m a railway enthusiast.” Later, he is able to contrive a second meeting with her because of his, yes, trainspotting superpower. ![]() T he Railway Man starts out like a sweet little romance, when Colin Firth meets Nicole Kidman, somewhere near Edinburgh in 1980, on a train he’s only on because his encyclopedic knowledge of train schedules is allowing him to compensate for an unexpected delay in his travel plans. ![]() (what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto) I’m “biast” (pro): like the cast enjoy stories about WWII ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |