The railway man movie reviews8/4/2023 ![]() ![]() Perhaps it’s this reluctance to tip over into Mel Gibson Passion of the Christ excess that neuters the film’s ultimate impact. The screenplay shuttles between past and present, Eric’s struggles with everyday life and his wife’s desperate attempts to get him help.Īlthough the wartime flashbacks do wield plenty of raw, emotional power, Teplitzky flinches, too often cutting away from the historic brutality in favor of a more easily digestible balance of darkness and light. This main timeline is intercut with the POW sequences that offer horrifying glimpses into the abysmal conditions the slaves were forced to endure. The two are soon married, but Patti’s concerns about her husband’s intensifying bouts of depression leads her to dig deeper by persuading Eric’s friend, Finlay (Stellan Skarsdaard), who she knows was with him on the Thai-Burma railway project, to provide insight into Eric’s worsening mental condition. She’s a demure nurse who interprets his gruffness as an endearing charm and his love of trains as a nerdy eccentricity. We first meet Eric Lomax sometime in the 1980s when the aging train aficionado (Colin Forth) meets and falls in love with Patti (Nicole Kidman) while, ironically enough, the two are commuting on a train. Plus, there’s enough good stuff going on to make this a recommended watch for military enthusiasts and war film buffs. That said, The Railway Man is an important film that needs to be seen if, for no other reason, than to shine a light on a mostly unknown atrocity of war, the scars of which still disfigure the Earth’s surface. Despite its melodramatic tendencies, it chugs and strains to find a strong and lasting emotional connection with an audience watching the tragedy unfold on the screen, while never feeling the total impact of it in our hearts. Unfortunately, that same intensity is never quite felt in Teplitzky’s film. Of course, these numbers are quite staggering and emphatically hammer home the intensity and impact of the physical and emotional pain these men must have endured. Of those who worked on the railway, an estimated 100,000 died as a direct result. The British had set out to build the railroad 40 years earlier but abandoned the project due to the rough terrain – that carved through mountains and jungle – the climate, health conditions and the sheer difficulty of the logistics. ![]() Lomax and over 180,000 Asian civilian laborers, and over 60,000 Allied prisoners of war were forced to work on the railway that was to stretch some 250 miles between Bangkok and what was then called Rangoon, Burma. They adapt Eric Lomax's memoirs of a British Army officer who is tormented as a prisoner of war at a Japanese labor camp during World War II. In The Railway Man, Jonathan Teplitzky and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce give a much more sobering look at those hardships through the eyes of a man who experienced it first hand. In reality, there is no bridge and there is no river Kwai as depicted in that movie, however, we were given superficial glimpses of the torture and brutality those men faced, but nothing that approached the reality of what was discovered years after the end of the war. In 1957’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, filmmaker David Lean gave us an entertaining – yet totally inaccurate – account of the hardships endured by Japanese-held POWs as they were forced to build the Thai/Burma “Death Railway” during WWII.
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