Eric Lomax was an engineer and a railway enthusiast who
was captured by the Japanese in the Second World War. He was put into forced
labour to help build the railroad across South East Asia. The British had
wanted to build this before the war but abandoned the plan because it would
have been inhuman in such extreme conditions to undertake the project without
treating a workforce as slaves. This is what the Japanese Imperial Army decided
to do.
The book upon which the film is based tells the story of
what happened to Lomax particularly from the point of view of the torture that
he endured and his post traumatic stress disorder after the war. The
manifestation of which prompts his new wife to get him to face the cause of it.
This is through a return visit to South East Asia to meet face to face with his
tormentor who they discover is not only still alive but working at the site of
the prison camp as a tour guide at the visitor centre that was created to tell
the history of the prison camp.
The key players are Colin Firth as Lomax and Nicole
Kidman as his wife with Jeremy Irvine as the younger Lomax. Hiroyuki Sanada
plays the Japanese prison guard and torturer. The narrative is told in layers –
how Lomax meets his wife – how she discovers his support system to deal with
his stress disorder (via his comrades) – flashbacks of the events in the prison
camp – and the resolution of his stress disorder. There is criticism about the
absence of other background information, such as Lomax’s first wife and
children. However, to include all of this would have detracted from the purpose
of the film which was to tell the story of his torture and the resolution to
his post war trauma.
This is not a fictional account of Lomax’s story. The
facts of the story have been proven and so this film is a factual account and
Lomax’s frame of reference on what happened to him is that he was the subject
of cruel and inhuman torture the brutality of which had scarred his ability to
function properly after the war. This detail we need to know because the
resolution to his personal conflict is what makes this film work. Without it,
it might have become another David Lean adventure story.
Meeting his tormentor face to face and putting him
through the motions of Lomax’s own torture, enables the audience to see how the
need for truth and reconciliation is at the heart of all conflict resolution.
In this story that resolution is powerfully told and portrayed by Colin Firth
and his tormentor.
A good and powerful story translated into film is what
cinema is good at and in this case, it doesn’t come much better.
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