10 Best Films Set In The Pacific War
3. The Railway Man
In 1995, rail engineer Eric Lomax published his heartbreaking memoir The Railway Man. It is a deeply personal story of suffering and incarceration, which tells the complex truth about not only his torture in a POW camp in Burma but also, importantly, about his long and painful journey to emotional recovery and his eventual reconciliation with his tormentor Takashi Nagase.
In 2013, the year after Lomax's death, the film adaptation was released. The cast is headed by Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman, and features a great turn by Jeremy Irvine as the young Lomax.
Sometimes the way that the finely detailed memoir is streamlined into the shape of a film is a little too neat. Key aspects of Lomax's recovery, such as his sustained therapy and his long correspondence with Nagase, are stripped away. In their place, we see a more conventional story of solitary recovery and a dramatic confrontation between Lomax and Nagase.
Historical inaccuracies are to be expected in movies like this, but this rewriting takes away a lot of what is most compelling about Lomax's story.
Nonetheless, The Railway Man is a vital story about the horror of war, the difficulty of recovery, and about the courage it takes to reconcile with one's enemy.