Nagase soon reveals that the Japanese (including himself) were brainwashed into thinking the war would be a victorious one for them, and that he never knew the high casualties caused by the Imperial Japanese Army. Lomax threatens to cut Nagase's throat and finally pushes him into a bamboo cage, of the kind in which Lomax and many other POWs had been placed as punishment. Out of guilt, Nagase does not resist, but Lomax redirects the blow at the last moment. The situation builds up to the point where Lomax prepares to smash Nagase's arm, using a club and a clamp designed by the Japanese for that purpose and now used as war exhibits. When he finally confronts his former captor, Lomax first questions him in the same way Nagase and his men had interrogated him years before. Lomax travels alone to Thailand and returns to the scene of his torture to confront Nagase 'in an attempt to let go of a lifetime of bitterness and hate'. Before Lomax can act on this information, Finlay, unable to handle his memories of his experiences, commits suicide by hanging himself from a bridge. His best friend and fellow ex-POW Finlay brings him evidence that one of their captors, a translator for the Japanese secret police Takashi Nagase, is now working as a tourist guide in the very camp where he translated for the Kempetai as they tortured British POWs. Thirty years later, Lomax is still suffering the psychological trauma of his wartime experiences, though strongly supported by his wife Patricia, whom he had met on one of his many train excursions, a true railway enthusiast. Lomax and his surviving comrades are finally rescued by the British Army. In fact, however, his only intention had been to use the device as a morale booster for himself and his fellow prisoner-slaves. Apparently, he had fallen under suspicion of being a spy, for supposedly using the British news broadcast receiver as a transmitter of military intelligence. The torture depicted includes beatings, food deprivation and waterboarding. During his time in the camp as one of the Far East prisoners of war, Lomax is tortured by the Kempeitai (military secret police) for building a radio receiver from spare parts. Jeremy Irvine (giving Firth a run for his money) plays the young Lomax in flashback as a geekish engineer who, with suicidal bravery, confesses to the Japanese he is responsible for building an illegal radio.During the Second World War, Eric Lomax is a British officer who is captured by the Japanese in Singapore and sent to a Japanese POW camp, where he is forced to work on the Thai- Burma Railway north of the Malay Peninsula. The whole thing plays like a mildly titillating Werther’s Original advert. His chat-up line is a running commentary of the towns they pass through (‘Lancaster. Lomax is the prickly, bachelor type – owl glasses, old-man tweeds and a caterpillar moustache crawling across his upper lip. Though it begins with a lovely scene, as Lomax, a lifelong railway enthusiast, meets his wife Patti (Nicole Kidman in frumpy vintage BHS), ‘Brief Encounter’-style on a train. His story has been adapted into a conventional, solid, occasionally clumsy drama. In Firth’s every grimace and flinch you feel the torment of Lomax’s private world, but emotionally ‘The Railway Man’ feels trimmed and tidied up. After decades suffering what we’d now call post-traumatic stress, he met and forgave the Japanese officer responsible. It’s based on an acclaimed memoir by Eric Lomax, who was captured by the Japanese, tortured and put to work on the notorious Burma railway in his early twenties. What a shame then that the rest of the film is less stiff-upper-lip, more just stiff. Colin Firth cements his reputation as the go-to man for repressed, buttoned-up masculinity with another performance of feeling and depth, playing a former soldier traumatised by World War II.
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