Knowledge of mortality capers around us like a brittle paper ribbon that barely touches our skin.” “In youth we live as if we were immortal. “We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place we stay there, even though we go away,” goes another. “The fear of death might be described as the fear of not being able to become whom one had planned to be,” goes one. But these mutterings are too disconnected and abstract to register as profound insights by a man in the process of self-discovery. Irons, are sprinkled through the movie to add a semblance of intellectual heft. His quotations, spoken in voice-over by Mr. “Night Train to Lisbon,” directed by Bille August (“Pelle the Conqueror”), was adapted from a philosophical novel by the oft-quoted Swiss author Pascal Mercier. Irons’s buttoned-up performance matches a screenplay (by Greg Latter and Ulrich Herrmann) in which most of the action remains off screen. Irons voices his thoughts in a tone of sepulchral weariness that contradicts the character’s supposed awakening. Raimund is as parched and pedantic a creature as T. Impulsively abandoning his comfortable post as a teacher of classical studies in Bern, Switzerland, he travels to Lisbon. Irons, leading a prestigious cast speaking English in an indecipherable mishmash of accents, Raimund undergoes a late midlife crisis. Early in “Night Train to Lisbon,” Raimund Gregorius ( Jeremy Irons), a stuffy academic, remarks that his wife left him because she found him boring.
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