As great as she is, and as much as I love her, it's been a couple of years since there was good reason to swoon over Rachel Weisz in a really good film. Like all the way back to 2009's The Brothers Bloom. 2011 hasn't exactly been stellar. The Whistleblower was a mediocre political thriller beneath her considerable talents, and the less said about Dream House the better. At least she got a studly new boytoy out of it. There's still a chance 360, which sees her paired up with The Constant Gardener director Fernando Meirelles, could be a hit but the word I'm hearing hasn't been positive in the least. So maybe it's time to look forward to 2012 for Weisz to bounce back.
She'll join a film that's I've been keenly interested in since it was first announced. That would be The Railway Man, based on the autobiography by Eric Lomax, a British Army officer and member of the Royal Corps of Signals who was captured by the Japanese and sent to a POW camp in 1942. The well known bridge over the river Kwai(yep, from the movie) was built using his forced labor and that of other POWs, and Lomax suffered terrible tortures and indignities as well.
Colin Firth is playing Lomax, with War Horse star Jeremy Irvine as the younger version of him. Weisz will be Patricia Wallace, Lomax's wife, who helps him deal with the aftereffects of his captivity by suggesting he reach out to his former tormentors. In 1995, Lomax reconciled with one of those torturers, and it was chronicled in an award winning documentary, Enemy My Friend.
Jonathan Teplitzky, director of the Matthew Goode festival hit, Burning Man(will we ever see it??), is behind the camera. What really gets me amped for this besides the story, which is amazing and deserving of big screen recognition, is that Frank Cottrell Boyce(Millions, 24 Hour Party People) wrote the script. Check please. Count me in.
Next year's looking good for Weisz, even if a lot of isn't the most hard hitting of her career. She has a role in one of Terrence Malick's upcoming films, which means she'll be great and nobody will go see it. After that it's pure franchise fluff, as she'll be in the next James Bond film, Skyfall. And let's not forget she'll don her pointy hat and play the evil witch Evanora in Sam Raimi's Oz the Great and Powerful. [DailyMail]
