The Railway Man: dramatic licence is well-earned and sparingly deployed
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Version 0 of 1. The Railway Man (2013)Director: Jonathan TeplitzkyEntertainment grade: B+History grade: B+ Related: The Railway Man's forgotten family: 'We were victims of torture too' During the second world war, the Japanese constructed the Burma-Siam Railway. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of Asian labourers, mostly conscripted, and 60,000 allied prisoners of war were forced to build the line. It became known as the Death Railway. Every sleeper laid was said to have cost a human life. Post-traumatic stress In 1980, Eric Lomax (Colin Firth, perfectly cast) falls in love with a woman called Patti Wallace (Nicole Kidman). He shaves off his unflattering moustache, so she falls in love with him back. Their dreamy romance darkens as she realises he is suffering from severe trauma. Eric Lomax was a lieutenant in the Royal Corps of Signals, taken prisoner by the Japanese on the fall of Singapore in 1942. He was transported to Thailand, where he was put to work as an engineer on the construction of the Death Railway. In the film, Patti can’t get the story out of him, so she talks instead to his friend and fellow veteran Finlay (Stellan Skarsgård). Finlay is a fictional character. He seems to be based partly on Lomax’s real friend Jim Bradley, though Finlay’s dramatic acts in the 1980 section of this film were invented by the film-makers. Camp life Finlay tells Patti of the Japanese labour camps, and how Lomax (played brilliantly as a young man by Jeremy Irvine) was taken away by the Kempeitai, the Japanese military police. Among his torturers, one man stood out: translator Takashi Nagase (Tanroh Ishida). Modern audiences largely know the story of the Death Railway from the novel and film The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). Though it is widely acclaimed, some veterans have complained that the actors in that movie looked too healthy and well-clothed. The Railway Man does its best to make its cast look skinny, dirty and malnourished – but any film would be limited by the fact that you simply can’t starve actors to the extent that the Japanese starved their POWs. The Imperial War Museum has some harrowing photographs showing how emaciated many of the survivors of Japanese POW camps were on their liberation. Torture Related: A torture rehabilitation expert's view on The Railway Man The Railway Man is also more accurate than The Bridge on the River Kwai in the glimpses it shows of the incessant and horrific torture faced by POWs. Several former POWs have written of their experiences: one of the finest accounts is by Alistair Urquhart, who wrote of men being tied, beaten, sexually assaulted and literally torn apart, and of the daily hardships of malnutrition, disease and slave labour. Urquhart described one torture similar to that seen in the film, where a hose is used to force water into a man’s stomach. “[Sergeant] Okada would then gleefully jump up and down on him”, he remembered. “Sometimes guards tied barbed wire around the poor soul’s stomach. Most died; only a few survived.” Again, any film would be limited in how much of this it could depict. The Railway Man treads a careful and effective line: implying the awfulness of what was done without putting too much on screen. Treatment Many ex-POWs, including Urquhart and Lomax, experienced serious and enduring psychological problems after the war. The one big thing the film probably shouldn’t have left out is the fact that Lomax sought help. “My turning point came in 1987, when I came across the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (now Freedom from Torture),” he said. “For the first time, I was able to unload the hate that had become my prison.” It’s regrettable that the film shows him as a strong, silent type, who has to pull himself together to deal with his problems alone. The NHS advice is clear: “Confronting your feelings and seeking professional help is often the only way of effectively treating PTSD.” Return Lomax travels back to Thailand to find Nagase (played as an older man by the terrific Hiroyuki Sanada). In real life, their meeting was arranged. Lomax read Nagase’s memoir, Crosses and Tigers, and was encouraged by his wife to write to his former torturer. Patti helped Lomax build up to his eventual return to the Mae Klong river (the Kwai of the novel and film). The scenes here in which Lomax strives for revenge did not happen – though Lomax did wonder if he might feel violent towards Nagase, so they function as an imaginative dramatisation of his emotions. Michael Finlason filmed the two men together in real life for his documentary Enemy, My Friend? The dynamic between them seems to have been respectful and cordial. Verdict Some critics found The Railway Man’s time-jumping structure too cumbersome – but as a historical film it is affecting and largely truthful. |