Review of The Railway Man (2013) by Singha T C — 06 May 2014

The Railway man belong to this trend of war films trying to reconcile us with the past and promote the idea that during war time both camp end up suffering more than what we could have imagined. Unfortunately this film didn't moved me at all. It was nice to look at. The cinematography was ok and the acting quite good especially N. Kidman who in a small part really nails it. S. Skarsgard is pretty convincing and incredibly easy to relate t as always. The problem comes from Colin Firth who's such an icy chump... he is very wooden and personally I have never been able to relate to any of his characters because he is so opaque and closed it seems as if that man is a wall and doesn't let anything sweat out. I believe in some films it's useful but here it completely spoil the emotion and I never felt any empathy for his character.

This film suffers also from a lack of creativity when it comes to flashbacks and storytelling. Someone like Terrence Malik, Oliver Stone or Stanley Kubrick would have done something incredible with such a rich subject. Unfortunately here it's about the quality of a TV movie on History channel. for this type of film and story it necessitate to be highly convincing and very careful not to fall into the trap of grotesque, exaggeration and cliché which is in my opinion exactly where this film has landed. I wanted to like this film because the story deserves to be remembered and is a clear example of human forgiveness but like I said the film was weak, cold and terribly casual. Everything felt like a polished reconstitution rather than a true cinematographic journey. Three times too bad.