However he is haunted by memory and suffering nightly traumas and flashbacks to the railway. It starts around 1980 when he meets a woman (played by Nicole Kidman), falls in love, marries … a pleasant romantic twenty minutes of screen time. The true story is about Eric Lomax, a railway enthusiast, traumatized by his experiences on the Death Railway. It is “Based on a True Story.” What happened to fiction? Every major film seems to be based on a true story. And that question of when or if you can forget, let alone forgive, is the subject of the film. Even so, Prince Philip, who served in that theatre of war, was right to avoid a situation where he might have had to shake hands with Hirohito. Japan is my favourite country of those I’ve visited. The locomotive used to be outside when I was there, now it’s in the war museum. The Bridge on the River Kwai, the plucky Brits, Dutch and Aussies whistling Colonel Bogey railway. Among it all is the first steam engine to travel the Thailand- Burma Railway. 1000 of them are convicted war criminals, 14 are Category A war criminals. It’s a monument to 2.5 million soldiers, who having died in action, are now regarded as deities. The best cure for jet lag is a walk in the fresh air so I’d wander there from the Grand Palace hotel before breakfast. Years ago I used to stay near the Yasakuni Shrine in Tokyo. Jeremy Irvine as the young Eric Lomax in WWII. If so, to what end? This time Firth’s entire film is doing the stuttering.Screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce & Andy Paterson Maybe this constant rerouting is supposed to echo junctions and points, the crossing between different lines of the same story. Not enough to locate the psychological trauma done to Lomax and his fellow veterans, huddled over pints in the desolate men-only bars of the British Legion. Even this Japanese POW brutality struggles to break the sticky TV cliché laid down by Tenko. How about our World War II special: grim flashbacks to the horrors of Burmese camps where Eric (now played by Jeremy Irvine) is singled out for torture by neurotic camp captain Nagase (Tanroh Ishida). While the general dramatic arena is clear, the script keeps changing focus: late-blooming love, the plight of discarded veterans, post-traumatic stress disorder, or the possibility of reconciliation. Simple, because he undermines strong performances with an absurdly haphazard structure and listless pace, heavy on both brake and throttle. How, then, is Aussie director Jonathan Teplitzky’s film so dramatically inert? So misleading? So fiddly? As is the vogue these days, snapshots of the actual couple roll beneath the closing credits as a reminder of the veracity of what we have seen. There is even the added honour of being based on a true story. Nicole Kidman, playing ordinary with plain brown hair and unmasked wrinkles, is the divorcée who plucks him from bachelorhood and risks confronting those wartime demons, the pair meeting, appropriately, on a train journey through pylon-studded Northern England. With the bitterest of ironies, the young Eric Lomax had been bewitched by railway lore - something he saw as a civilising force, connecting the world. The British actor, who could dance this brand of fractured nobility on the head of a pin, is the former POW scarred by a war spent building the very railway that cut through Burma and over the bridge that later starred in The Bridge On The River Kwai. Colin Firth’s new movie promises awards-frequency gravitas.
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