When David Bowie died earlier this month, I decided to immediately order this from Netflix. My mom ended up watching this with me though she missed some sequences as we were eating dinner during it. She found it depressing. Well, it is as it depicts a prisoner-of-war camp in Indonesia during World War II. Bowie plays a British soldier who gets sent there and he seems to have an effect on the commandant there. By the way, he's not the Mr. Lawrence of the title, that's Tom Conti as the British colonel who knows the language of the Japanese officers there. I'll admit right off the bat that some sequences confused me like the ones of a flashback of Bowie's life before the war concerning his little brother. Had I not read some of the synopsis on Wikipedia, I would have been completely in the dark about that one. Still, this was a mostly compelling drama of the brutality of that time and place. So on that note, I say give Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence a look.