Insurmountable trauma, disturbingly deconstructing any stable sense of self, recurring, regenerating, relapsing, biding its time, crocodiling in crucible, beyond sublimatic recourse, entrenched and ravenous, purloined to renew, its helpless, caustic, blight.
Eric Lomax (Colin Firth/Jeremy Irvine) survived systematic torture in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during World War II to return to Britain a free man, yet the horrific memories have left him sealed and solitary.
Love's invigorating warmth can't help him overcome, and his desperate wife Patti (Nicole Kidman) seeks the aid of his comrades of war to find a sustainable solution.
As luck would have it, the whereabouts of one of his assaulter's accomplices have been discovered, such knowledge providing him with the potential to pursue a just cause.
Hesitant and confused, The Railway Man struggles with this burden, before submitting to the inevitable, and retributively withstanding.
It jumps between the present and the past, the length of the wartime scenes compounding Mr. Lomax's illness, suggesting that he is capable of circumventing its madness for a time, before its destabilizing will pathologically lurches.
I prefer it when filmmakers regularly intercut psychologically debilitating lesions but Jonathan Teplitzky's method speaks to Mr. Lomax's strength, and brilliance.
The Railway Man is a rational film, examining the affects of war on a highly logical mind.
It therefore lacks the emotional depth I'm used to seeing in films exploring the aftershocks of war, triumphing in its temperance, resolving through reason.
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