Married to 'The Railway Man'

"The Railway Man," based on the best-selling 1995 memoir by Eric Lomax, is a film about war, love, redemption, and forgiveness. The one thing it isn't is "The Bridge on the River Kwai." That 1957 Oscar-winner directed by David Lean is probably how most people learned about the infamous Burma Railway, constructed during World War II by thousands of mostly British soldiers captured by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore.

"Veterans didn't like that movie at all. Everyone looked far too well-fed," says Patti Lomax, Eric's widow, during a recent visit to Boston.

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Lomax is portrayed in "The Railway Man" by Nicole Kidman. Colin Firth stars as the post-war Eric Lomax, and Jeremy Irvine plays him as a young man who joined the Royal Corps of Signals in 1939, when he was 19.

"The Railway Man" — both book and film — unflinchingly describes the horrific conditions that Allied POWs suffered in the camps. The Japanese used the men as slave labor to build the railway to support the large Japanese army in Burma. About 13,000 soldiers and many more Asian civilians died during construction. After relentless torture by one particularly brutal guard, Takashi Nagase, Eric Lomax returned home to England haunted by his experience. With the help of Patti, whom he married in 1983, he returned to Thailand in 1993 to confront Nagase, who was acting as a tour guide at the same camp where Lomax had been imprisoned. He found Nagase full of remorse and seeking forgiveness. The two gradually formed a friendship that endured until Nagase's death in 2011.

Eric Lomax died in 2012, at 93, but he lived long enough to see the film go into production. "Eric was there the day they shot the scene of Colin [near their home] in Berwick-upon-Tweed looking out over the countryside. He described it as one of the happiest days of his life," says Patti Lomax, now 76. "The book was personal; it was Eric's baby. The film, he felt, belonged to everybody.

"I had been promised by [producer] Bill Curbishley when we first met him. He said, 'Patti, it doesn't matter how long it takes. This movie will be made.' He kept his promise."

Andy Paterson, who wrote the script with Frank Cottrell Boyce, says it took some 15 years to bring "The Railway Man" to the screen because the writers struggled with how to tell the story.

Jaap Buitendijk/The Weinstein Company via ap

Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman as Eric and Patti Lomax in "The Railway Man."

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"The book is extraordinary. For there to be a point to making the film, it had to be better or different," says Paterson. "I was particularly keen to tell Patti's part in the story because I felt it represented the families who cope with the wreckage of war that we never acknowledge. We certainly never put it on the ballot sheet when we think of going into war, then or now. . . . Her story gave us a way to get at the tension — this man she meets on a train and discovers this past trauma and has the extraordinary strength to find out how to help him."

The finished film has brought some comfort, but the real solace, Lomax says, is that it might help the many families of soldiers wrestling with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. "Berwick-upon-Tweed, where we live, has many veterans of the battalion from Singapore: fathers, grandfathers, uncles. The movie has been selling out and causing a stir. Now more people understand why their relatives shut down. They couldn't express what had happened to them. My husband was a classic example of what happens when PTSD isn't treated. It doesn't go away; it sometimes gets worse. Until books like Eric's, nobody could comprehend the awfulness of what they had to endure."

Although the physical torture makes up only a small part of the story in the film, both Paterson and Lomax say it was necessary to be explicit, including one scene where Eric is tied down, blindfolded, and his captors pour water down his throat.

"I believe there's a modern message in the water-boarding scene. Let's call it what it is. It's torture," says Lomax. "There are no winners in war. That's what Eric used to say."

Source: http://www.news.myanmaronlinecentre.com/2014/04/20/married-to-the-railway-man/