One of the most difficult tasks in anyone’s life is to forgive and learn to love someone’s heinous actions that have damaged their senses. Few victims can dare to do that. In this memorable film starring Colin Firth as a British veteran of a Japanese prison camp and survivor of the Thai-Burma Railway workforce, we see a man tortured beyond endurance. Even thirty-five years after the end of World War II, Colin Firth’s character, Eric Lomax, suffers in his dreams all the brutality that afflicted him then.

One man stands out, the Japanese interpreter, who saw that every punishment carried its mark on Lomax. In Eric Lomax’s eyes, this man, Nagase, was the cause of all the remembered terror. One day, Lomax’s friend and fellow veteran comes across an article featuring Nagase’s new life as a tour guide in the same prison where he once reigned. He has somehow escaped sentence for war crimes. So for now, he guides visitors through all the existing torture devices and bamboo quills that once coerced prisoners. Finally, thinks Lomax’s friend Finlay, played by Stellan Skarsgard, Lomax can get his revenge.

Finlay himself suffers from his own situation in that prison. When Lomax hesitates, Finlay tells Patti, Lomax’s new wife, that very soon an act he plans to commit will surely send a message that he will have to convince Lomax to take a trip to that prison and face his cruel tormentor. What he does, which I will not reveal to you, pushes Lomax to make the dreaded trip.

I think the crux of this film is the meeting that takes place between these two worn men.

The acting is top notch; and Negase’s confession, and Lomax’s forgiveness is not a quick fix… At first, Lomax is prepared to kill the other, but he can’t bring himself to do it. But he does try to evoke the very tortures he himself endured. But that doesn’t work either. There is much more that happens to each of them before there is reconciliation, eventually even true love. The whole performance was a privilege to perceive and, in any case, it is one of the great gifts that cinema can give us: an experience that we do not have to endure ourselves, but from which we can obtain much wisdom.

Although Colin Firth plays Lomax as the older man after he returns home from the war, Jeremy Irvine plays the younger Lomax well. So, too, Negaze is played by Tanroh Ishida when he is young, doing the torture, and by Hiroyuki Sanada when he is older and facing Lomax. Lomax’s wife, Patti, is played by Nicole Kidman.

Questions: Why is this movie called? “THE MACHINIST?” It’s a bit of a misnomer, although Eric Lomax always had a penchant for all things “rail”, and knew the timetables and histories of trains everywhere in Britain, as well as many places around the world. This was the claim of some kind of control of him; and when he was a prisoner, building the route and maintaining the equipment, he secretly shared a map he had drawn, showing how the railway would go. When his captors found out about him, they took him in for questioning and couldn’t believe that he was a “crazy train guy”, drawing maps. This was one of his acts that caused him to be tortured. That effort of the Burma-Thailand Railway caused the death of more than one hundred thousand prisoners and civilians building it.

I thought “THE MACHINIST” it had a well-written script, thanks to Andy Paterson and Frank Cottrell Boyce… Gary Phillips shot the Northumberland coast and the Southeast Asian jungle, all of which gave the film its stark and contrasting complexity. David Hirschfelder’s music evoked an emotional baseness and eerie hesitation that accompanied the various moods shared by the actors. Jonathan Teplitzsky directed “THE RAILWAY MAN” with a grace that didn’t cut corners that might have let us down from the film’s steady pace.

Everybody knows that war is crazy; and yet, from this, a man grew great. Both he and she deserve an EIGHT.

What gives my rating:

EIGHT: “As good as it could be.”

SEVEN: “That bit of excellence is missing.”

SIX: “Somehow it just didn’t work out right.”

FIVE: “I have to feel bad about that.”

FOUR: “All that work and nothing to show.”