The script writers also decided to skip over the fact that Eric Lomax had been married before and had children before he met Patti and surely this knowledge would have given us a greater insight into Lomax's troubled psyche as he wrestled with the demons which haunted him day and night. The film's other problem is when the adaption veers totally away from the facts and the over-dramatization or Hollywood treatment of the bones of the story make it implausible and bordering on the melodramatic, especially in the confrontation with Lomax and one of his former torturers, played brilliantly by Hiroyuki Sanada. Also, all the supporting screens in the British Legion Club and Lomax's house all have the feel of a decade earlier and they never seem to get it right. In the opening part of the film Lomax and Patti Wallace, his future wife, are on a train and I immediately thought this was set somewhere in the late sixties, but in fact it is supposed to be in the early eighties - Lomax was around sixty at the time but he looks like a secondary school geography teacher in his mid-forties. The Railway Man's main weakness is its time-lines. What we do see, including the torture of Lomax is broken up with Lomax trying to come to terms with his past life set in the present day. Lomax's story is now well known, and after reading about the horrors he and his fellow prisoners endured under internment by the Japanese they defy imagination and we are offered a glimpse of this after his capture, but never does the film dwell too long on this and the experience would be almost impossible to bring to the screen in a main-line feature film. The fact is that Firth is out-gunned by nearly all the other cast, especially Nicole Kidman, and his younger self, a first class performance by James Irvine, and Firth appears to get younger and younger as the film goes along, until he ends up looking exactly like Colin Firth in real life. Overall, the acting, directing and narrative, told through sensibly paced flashbacks, all work fine and Colin Firth's Eric is a solid if unexciting piece of acting: I was crying out for Kenneth Branagh every time he appeared on screen, as he is an actor of about the same age would has the ability to articulate inner angst like few others - think Wallander. I think that is how I nearly felt about The Railway Man, but it managed to pick up just as the disappointment began to seep in.
The first thing about the film, The Railway Man, is that it is based on Eric Lomax's book rather than stay true to it, so if you have read it and expect it to conform to the facts you will be at times be confused and wondering if you missed out a couple of pages, and nearly feeling a shade disappointed. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice.
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