His late-in-life romance with Patti (Nicole Kidman) is hijacked by trauma that manifests in violent rages as well as determined silences that freeze out her gentle enquiries. While Lomax wasn’t imprisoned for the 27 years that Mandela was incarcerated, The Railway Man makes clear that his wartime experience has held him captive long after the end of hostilities.
His hate burns against Takashi Nagase (played by Tanroh Ishida in the past and Hiroyuki Sanada in the present), the army interpreter who becomes a figurehead for the torture Lomax endures. In response the Kempeitai interrogate and imprison Lomax, who manages to survive despite the terrible treatment.
It doesn’t help that Lomax, a self-described “railway enthusiast”, was also mapping the progression of the railway in vain hopes of passing on this intelligence to Allied forces. Lomax comes to the attention of the Kempeitai, the Japanese military police, after they discover the makeshift radio he built to keep track of the war. The construction of the ‘death railway’, as it came to be known, was a titanic endeavour that stretched for over 400km through rock and tropical jungle that the men had to carve out with nothing but hand tools and in sweltering conditions where dysentery, disease, and malnutrition were rife. After the fall of Singapore in 1942, where Lomax (played by Jeremy Irvine) was serving as a British Signals Officer, Lomax as well as some 60,000 other Allied soldiers, and as many as 300,000 Asian labourers, were used as slave labour to build the Burma-Thai Railway that would keep the Japanese army supplied. Given recent commemorative efforts paying tribute to Mandela’s life, his story is likely better known than that of Lomax. The stories of Mandela and Eric Lomax, upon whose 1995 autobiography the film is based, share excruciating experiences of decades-long suffering as well as awe-inspiring moves to extend grace and forbearance to their former enemies when primal human impulse would seek retaliation instead. With the passing away of Nelson Mandela in late 2013, and Colin Firth’s new film The Railway Man now in cinemas, matters of forgiveness and reconciliation are in the public eye.