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The railway man cast3/16/2023 Skarsgard brings gravitas to his fellow survivor role, and the younger Kidman is beguiling in the courtship scenes, given too little to play in the “Why won’t you talk to me?” ones. Shifts in attitude and tone are abrupt, as Firth plays Lomax as utterlyīroken, teetering on the brink of madness at one moment, lucid and calculating the next. Interpreter/interrogator, played by Tanroh Ishida in the war scenes and Hiroyuki Sanada in the 1980 “present.” Those scenes, whatever their moral rectitude, ring hollow and false. Teplitzky and the screenwriters very clumsily document the way the real Eric Lomax came to terms with it and his chief tormentor, a secret police “The Railway Man” vividly, if unevenly recreates that horrific past. They were small men, physically, mentally and spiritually, raised on a diet of rice and racism. These weren’t the best and the brightest. But beatings, torture and summary executions are a constant threat.ĭirector Jonathan Teplitzky cast emaciated men to play many of the prisoners, and took care to get the Japanese right, too, historically. They may be needed to keep the few machines the Japanese are using to build this rail line going. But once there, they see the awful consequences of getting caught doing that. The young radio operators, Eric and Finley (played by Jeremy Irvine and Sam Reid) pocket vacuum tubes and other radio parts as they line up to march into captivity. Singapore, which Churchill called “the worst disaster” in British military In a long flashback, we see the shameful, seemingly premature surrender of They all have been living with for 40 years (the movie is set in 1980). Not talk about what they went through together building that Thai-Burma Railway.įinlay (Stellan Skarsgard) is dismissive, but eventually he fills her in on what Patti Lomax has to pry information out of Eric’s peers, the men who meet to Labor under inhuman conditions in the jungles of Thailand, it was a fetid, Games with the Japanese, whistling the “Colonel Bogey March” as they did.įor those who lived through it, prisoners of war worked to death as slave River Kwai wasn’t all British stiff upper lips, jolly good sport playing head And even if it stumbles on its way to its fairly obvious, politically correct conclusion, it’s still worthwhile as aĬloser read on history than the decades of WWII movies that preceded it.īecause it’s good to remember that the construction of the Bridge over the This slow, uneven drama is a different sort of British prisoner of war movie. “The Railway Man” is about the horrors the people who lived through the “Keep calm and carry on” era didn’t talk about. Thus begins an adorable loveīut Eric has night terrors, paralyzing seizures of fear set off by a phrase,Ī song on the radio. Runs into on her home bound train some days later. His small talk is pattering on about the history of every village, hamlet and “I’m not a train spotter, I’m a railway enthusiast.” His encyclopedic knowledge of rail schedules gives away that he’s Way too soon, that she’s “newly single.” He is bookish, awkward, slow to pick up She (Nicole Kidman) is a bit taken aback, but only for a moment. In Hollywood parlance, they “meet cute” - he stumbles into her first class
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