Does a film get a free pass if it’s portraying a historical
tragedy? Some people seem to think so,
for the tragedy itself is what sticks in people’s minds, not the portrayal
itself. And The Railway Man does a good job of letting people know of a
particular tragedy that happened in World War II, a tragedy that I myself as a
historical layperson wasn’t aware of.
But does that excuse the film for a largely dull depiction? After all, the point of narrative cinema is
generally to entertain, not to educate.
I think The Railway Man misses
the mark on that front, and that makes what should be a story worth paying
attention to into a lecture on why Japanese imperialism was bad.
Eric Lomax, played by Colin Firth, was a prisoner of war in
Southeast Asia, forced by the Japanese to help construct a railroad in terrain
where men were enslaved until their inevitable death by exhaustion. In the 1970s, Lomax attempts to establish a
happy life for himself, marrying a woman he met on a train, but ultimately
distances himself from her as PTSD starts to consume him. The first half of the film focuses on Lomax’s
wife, played by Nicole Kidman, who investigates the events that led to Lomax’s
breakdown, and the second half focuses on Lomax’s confrontation with one of his
former captors, a Japanese interpreter.
The main story arc is about Lomax’s self-healing after years of bottled
hatred, but it would be understandable why that could be lost on a casual
viewer watching the film.
When the main set-piece conversations take place, the film
flashes back to the events that led to Lomax’s torture at the hands of the
Japanese. However, when it does so, the
events portrayed don’t so much show us examples of Japanese brutality as just
tell us that they're there. Eventually we
see Japanese soldiers mistreat the British prisoners, but it ends up feeling
token after the film does such a poor job establishing their villainy. Furthermore, none of the characters in the
flashback scenes have enough established personality to make them memorable or
empathetic.
The present-day (by which I mean the 1970s, but the film
treats as the present) scenes don’t fare much better. The main characters of Lomax and his wife are
at least distinguishable by gender, but don’t emote much beyond tortured
anguish and loving concern. While Firth
and Kidman do admirably at conveying those emotions, they don’t exhibit much
range here, and the lack of emotional resonance becomes wearisome much too
quickly. It doesn’t help that most of
the present-day sequences consist entirely of people just sitting around having
calm conversations, with one notable exception toward the end, and even that
quickly dissolves to a simmer. It makes
it really hard to care about the emotional struggles of a person if there’s no
encouragement for the audience to feel as they do.
I really appreciate what The
Railway Man is trying to do here.
This is a tragic tale of war crimes and a man’s struggle to overcome his
emotional trauma, but the direction of this film seems so devoid of emotion
that it’s hard to see this as much more than an artfully told lecture. And lectures by their very nature tend to be
quite boring. Don’t give this one free
pass, but pass up on it altogether.
Any historical films tickle your fancy in a way this one
didn’t for me? Let me know in the
comments below!
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