The railway man

I very rarely speak about the films I watch on a weekly basis but the fact that I have watched what I consider to have been the best film I came across recently has had me voice a few considerations.

An adaptation of the best selling autobiography of the same name by Eric Lomax, a British officer captured by the Japanese during World War II and sent to a POW camp, The Railway man unveils the post-traumatic situation the main character has had to go through, which strongly affected his life as a married man but  it also approaches, though in a rather less intense way the reconciliation process he set himself to, which he partly owed to his  loving wife's effort.

It is interspersed by very brutal scenes of what are supposed to be "flashes" of the  daily life of those used as slaves by the Japanese to build the Thai-Burma railway but I suppose they are necessary to provide us with a realistic insight of the ordeal prisoners of war went through in those particular camps and the extent of their potential physical and psychological damages.

I was particularly impressed with the performances of Jeremy Irvine and Collin Firth, both of whom interpreted Lomax during and after World War II respectively.

Jeremy Irvine's critical praise earned him the reputation of method actor, after he went for two months without food, having opted to perform his own torture scenes in the film. In regards to Collin Firth amongst many other praises the following has been written "It is not easy to play an uncommunicative character in a medium that is all about communication, but nobody does it better than Firth." and I couldn't agree more.