With its timely themes of suffering, reconciliation and healing, The Railway Man is currently sharing its wares with audiences at the Toronto Internation Film Festival. The film is one we've had an eye on since it was announced back in 2011, when Colin Firth was enthusing about the adaptation of Eric Lomax's much-read novel, and now there is a trailer that you can watch right here.
Directed by Sydney-born director Jonathan Teplitzky, The Railway Man is an Anglo-Aussie adapation that tackles the aftermath of the military disaster that befell the two Allied nations when Singapore surrender to the Japanese in 1942. Thousands of soldiers, including young signaller and Scottish railway buff Lomax (Jeremy Irvine), were marched into captivity to work on the notorious Burma railway amid barely conceivable privations.
Lomax survived to record his experience in prose, but it was the efforts of his wife, Patricia Wallace (Nicole Kidman), to engineer a reconciliation with his Japanese tormentor Takashi Nagase (The Wolverine's Hiroyuki Sanada) that forms the heart of the story.
First-time screenwriter Andy Paterson and 24 Hour Party People and **Millions **scribe Frank Cottrell Boyce have spliced the brutal wartime experiences of Irvine's young Lomax with the post-traumatic torment of Firth's older iteration into an intimate tale we're tempted to call The Bridge On The River Tweed. **The Railway Man **is out on January 3.