The younger Lomax (Jeremy Irvine) and Finlay (Sam Reid) are radio engineers when the surrender forces them into servitude. “I don’t believe in this code of silence you have.”Īs Finlay fills in the details, the story unfolds in flashback. But he refuses to discuss what happened in the internment camp.ĭesperate to help him, Patti seeks out Lomax’s friend and fellow POW Finlay (Stellan Skarsgard) for advice and insight. Patti can see he is shell-shocked, crippled by post-traumatic stress disorder. Lomax has terrifying nightmares, and his behavior is erratic, at times violent. Sparks fly (shades of 1945’s “Brief Encounter”), and they wed.īut the long shadow of war looms over their marriage. On one such trip, he sits opposite Patti (Nicole Kidman), a retired nurse. He whiles away the days taking rail journeys around the country. Lomax (Colin Firth) lives an unsettled, absent-minded existence in Scotland. “The Railway Man” begins three decades after the war. This is the same railroad featured in the fictional 1957 film “The Bridge Over the River Kwai.”
Prisoners of war like Lomax were forced into slave labor to build the notorious Burma Railway, which became known as the “Death Railway” because of the thousands who perished during its construction. The stunning fall of that stronghold - the “Gibraltar of the East” - was, in Winston Churchill’s words, the “worst disaster” in British military history. During World War II, Lomax was one of thousands of British-led Allied troops taken prisoner by Japanese forces following the latter’s 1942 capture of Singapore. NEW YORK (CNS) - Human cruelty takes its toll in “The Railway Man” (Weinstein), a searing account of a former prisoner of war who is unable to overcome the emotional trauma of his past.ĭirected by Jonathan Teplitsky (“Burning Man”), the movie is based on Eric Lomax’s 1995 autobiography of the same title.
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