A great actor shouldn’t only be judged on what they can do with a masterful script, but also on how they can take a lesser work and still let it soar. Anthony Hopkins has achieved this with grace in One Life, a somewhat thin, reductively sentimental retelling of the life of British humanitarian Sir Nicholas Winton, which its star has empowered with raw, much-needed complexity.
Screenwriters Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake, meanwhile, find themselves torn in two by conflicting impulses. On the one hand, they’ve been compelled to tell the story of a man who overcame needless, restrictive bureaucracy, and an apathetic home nation, to rescue 669 mainly Jewish refugee children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Alongside Doreen Warriner and Trevor Chadwick, Winton facilitated their escape on a series of eight Kindertransports, which eventually brought them to the UK and the homes of local sponsor families.
Johnny Flynn does an admirable job of depicting the stammering, quiet resilience of a younger Winton in the film’s substantial flashbacks. We see him, at work in Prague, with Warriner (Romola Garai) and Chadwick (Alex Sharp), while his mother Babi (Helena Bonham Carter) oversees the operation’s London branch. Director James Hawes, transitioning over from television, translates these events to screen with appropriate, ever-thrumming terror. Haunting photographs of children, whose futures rely upon paper visas and wooden train seats, stare up from paper-clipped documents. We see them wrenched from their parents, their names scribbled on pieces of card placed around their necks.
It’s in the film’s primary narrative, though, that Coxon and Drake struggle, despite Hopkins’s transformative work. We visit an older Winton, in 1987, at home in Maidenhead with his wife Grete (Lena Olin), hemmed in on all sides by boxes of old memories. She pushes him to sort through the mess, and it’s here that he discovers a scrapbook filled with photographs of the children who made it to the Kindertransports. It eventually ends up in the hands of Elisabeth Maxwell, wife of Czechoslovak-born newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell, who puts into motion Winton’s famous 1988 appearance on Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life! – in which the presenter surprised him with an audience filled entirely with those he’d saved and their descendants.
It’s a self-evidently poignant scene (though hardly as much as the real thing), yet the film’s narrow, near-obsessive focus on rewarding Winton’s humility both lessens the profundity of his heroism and plays too conveniently into populist British cinema’s obsession with stoicism. His actions weren’t public knowledge until his television debut, not simply because he’d been too self-effacing to talk about it, but because they had to be done outside of the mainstream consensus, and often in defiance of authority.
We see Babi, in flashback, chastising government workers left, right, and centre for refusing to believe these children are in imminent danger (Bonham Carter makes for a glorious, righteous mother). But Hawes’s film is far too quick to turn away from the resistance she and her son faced in their own country. It’s Hopkins who laces his matter-of-fact delivery with a hint of rage, and ever-burning regret over those he could not save. “It’s just never enough, is it,” he laments.
One Life allows its audience to satisfy themselves by seeing a great hero celebrated, yet never forces them to reckon with what lies right at their feet – a new generation of heroes, still fighting an uphill battle simply to do the right thing.
Dir: James Hawes. Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Johnny Flynn, Lena Olin, Romola Garai, Alex Sharp, Jonathan Pryce, Helena Bonham Carter. 12A, 109 minutes
‘One Life’ is in cinemas now