Jeremy Irvine matches Firth as the bespectacled, 21-year-old Lomax, a rail enthusiast thrust into horror far from his Scottish home. The initially charming Firth-Kidman romance (pictured left), and Kidman’s part in the film, are soon subsidiary to an extensive wartime flashback, first teased out of Stellan Skarsgaard’s fellow veteran.

When Lomax writhes and screams with nightmares on the bedroom floor, and his retreat into himself brutally consumes their marriage, she realises stiff upper lips can snap and scar ( a Lomax nightmare of being back in the camp is pictured above). After The King’s Speech, the more substantial wartime sacrifice of this hero combines Firth’s own instinct for tasteful reserve with his capacity for naked emotion.Īs Canadian nurse Patti Wallace, Nicole Kidman thinks she is meeting a repressed British gentleman in her own Brief Encounter when she starts talking to Lomax on a train in 1980, and they swiftly marry. Its producers wanted an actor who doesn’t quite exist anymore, someone like the deeply moving Robert Donat, whose quiet decency, dignity and humour exemplified Britain’s wartime ideal (and which Alec Guinness’s Kwai officer tragically perverted). It also goes further than The Bridge Over the River Kwai, which Lomax thought sanitised, in indicating the relentless savagery which he forgave.Ĭasting Colin Firth as Lomax is the film’s great coup. The week after Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Jonathan Teplitzky’s film again shows a man’s extraordinary capacity for forgiveness.

Lomax’s memoir The Railway Man describes this and the reconciliation with one of his captors which finally defined his life.

A British POW after the fall of Singapore who was put to work by the Japanese on the Burma Railway, he suffered brutal and prolonged torture, trauma he dealt with in subsequent decades by sealing it inside him, and plotting revenge on his abusers as he fell into troubled sleep. The agony of war and of surviving it almost destroyed Eric Lomax.

The railway man wikipedia