The Railway Man (2013)

The Railway Man arrives with the heavyset dignity of a film that knows precisely what it is: an adaptation of Eric Lomax's 1995 memoir, a study of a British officer broken by the Thai-Burma Railway and the decades of silence that followed. Colin Firth plays the older Lomax with a tight, wounded stillness, while Jeremy Irvine handles the younger man in the camps. Nicole Kidman appears as Patricia, the wife who refuses to let him drown quietly. Hiroyuki Sanada is Takashi Nagase, the interpreter who once stood beside the torturers and now stands beside a tourist kiosk at the same site. The casting is period-appropriate and modest in its inclusiveness. A woman and a Japanese actor carry substantial weight, which is simply what the story required.

What the film declines to do is instructive. Its anguish stays lodged in individual bodies. Lomax's trauma is a private wound, not a symptom of empire or race, and the screenplay has no interest in indicting systems. The Japanese are portrayed as men who were themselves lied to, a gesture toward shared suffering that keeps the moral ledger balanced and the politics out of the room. Nagase's confession, that he was brainwashed, arrives as personal absolution. Nothing here asks the audience to reconsider colonialism, capitalism, or the climate. It asks them to watch two old men embrace.

The result is a respectable, slightly stodgy drama that premiered at Toronto and collected mixed notices, its reception built on Firth's grief and Kidman's unexpectedly dowdy, unsentimental turn. It is a film about forgiveness, and forgiveness is not a lecture. There is no sermon here, no lesson appended to the closing credits, no invitation to audit one's own complicity in anything larger than a single ruined friendship. Historians quibbled with the compression of the postwar correspondence, which is the sort of complaint a film like this tends to attract. The whole enterprise sits comfortably in an older sensibility, earnest and humanist and untroubled by the cultural weather of the present. It means well. It always has.