Director: James Hawes
Writers: Lucinda Coxon, Nick Drake, Barbara Winton
Stars: Anthony Hopkins, Lena Olin, Johnny Flynn
Synopsis: Sir Nicholas ‘Nicky’ Winton, a young London broker who, in the months leading up to World War II, rescued over 600 children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.
Sir Nicholas Winton was, for many years, one of the “unsung heroes” of World War Two. Dubbed the “British Schindler,” Winton and his associates managed to rescue 669 children who ended up in Prague after The Munich Agreement ceded Sudetenland to Hitler in 1938. Bohemia’s ethnic, political, and religious diversity made it a prime candidate for the Nazi first putsch. With a large amount of Jewish and Roma people inhabiting the area as well as Socialist intellectuals; the Third Reich used it as a testing ground before the invasion of Poland.
Director James Hawes takes from Barbara Winton’s biography of her father, Winton’s own scrapbooks and stories, and the now famous episodes of ‘That’s Life!’ aired in 1988 to build his by-the-numbers biopic. The aim is not so much to adequately explain the horror of the beginnings of the Holocaust; something most people should be more than familiar with, but to highlight how a few “ordinary people” decided to step up and do what they considered to be the right thing. Unbidden by any government, Nicholas Winton was an educated stockbroker from an immigrant family, who decided he must do whatever he could to assist those in need.
Hawes begins the film in 1987. Nicky Winton (Anthony Hopkins) is still tirelessly working collecting money for charitable causes. His wife, Grete (Lena Olin) is patient but bemused by Nicky’s drive to keep making a humanitarian difference. They are about to become grandparents and Grete just wants Nicky to start letting go of the past so he can embrace the future of new life joining the family.
Grete decides she will spend some time with their pregnant daughter Barbara (Ffion Jolly) and begs Nicky to start making space. There are boxes upon boxes in their Maidenhead shire home. Nicky reluctantly agrees to declutter; but there is a briefcase he can’t let go of. The briefcase filled with information about the Kindertransport scheme he was involved with from 1938 to 1939. Before Grete gets goes to spend time with Barbara, she says to Nicky, “Don’t let yourself get the way you get.”
The way Nicky “gets” is haunted that he failed to save as many children as he could. Hopkins plays Winton as somewhere between mournful, annoyed, uncommunicative, yet still pushing for people to know what happened. He doesn’t want the credit, but people should not forget. He’s haunted by the Holocaust. Nicky Winton is also the easy focus for the British Savior narrative, because he was born in England to Russian and German Jewish parents. His parents converted to Church of England and became prosperous. Nicky worked as a stockbroker, became a left-wing agnostic, and somehow represented all that is “right and proper” within Britain.
Hawes takes the audience back to 1938 and the Wintons’ (recently changed from Wertheim after having to deal with the xenophobia of World War One) well appointed Hampstead apartment. Babi Winton (Helena Bonham-Carter) is bemoaning the fact that young Nicky (Johnny Flynn) has decided he will go to Czechoslovakia despite the growing troubles there. It was supposed to be a skiing trip with his friend Martin Blake, but instead Nicholas volunteers to help a group of people trying to keep the Sudenten alive through a harsh winter and the incoming Nazi takeover of Prague and eventual border closures.
Winton meets up with Doreen Warriner (Romola Garai in serious no-nonsense mode), the somewhat impetuous but passionate Trevor Chadwick (Alex Sharp) and camp liaison Hana Hejdukova (Juliana Moska). Doreen’s operation, The British Committee for Refugees, from Czechoslovakia is running on donations and fumes. Doreen’s primary objective is to get political refugees and intellectuals out, but Winton insists that the children are the most vulnerable and must be prioritized.
Hawes directs Nicky in the freezing makeshift camps very well. He spends just enough time on the faces of the children to make his point — or particularly to inform the audience how Winton came to desperately want to protect the children. In reality, Winton was only in Prague for three weeks. But during that time the film posits he was the man who ensured the Prague Kindertransport happened. Meeting with a skeptical Rabbi (Samuel Finzi) who asks, “How will you ensure they maintain their heritage?” Winton’s answer is enough to convince him to advocate for the transport. The Rabbi warns Nicky, “Don’t start what you cannot finish.”
While Flynn gives an empathetic and adequate performance as the younger Winton, he is very much outclassed by Bonham-Carter as Babi Winton. It is Babi who uses the rhetoric of the “British people being morally upstanding” to guilt bureaucrats, bankers, Rotary Members, Ladies who Lunch, Church of England clergy, Sports clubs, and others to get involved. Babi’s “I am British, thank you very much,” attitude serves as one of the few acknowledgements of the still prevalent xenophobia in British society at the time. There are no Oswald Mosley types in the background (perhaps the film would be a little less cloying if there were). Hawes isn’t doing anything particularly complicated with the social attitude. Babi sees one letter which comes in with the donations asking, “Why are you bringing the dirty Jews here?” which she throws on the fire.
Lack of complication seems to be what the film is aiming for. The frantic race to get the children out of Prague doesn’t quite feel as urgent as it should because Hawes is more concerned with talking about the beginning of the Holocaust without showing the audience anything profoundly distressing. It is sad, and in hindsight tragic, but more melodramatic than filled with terror. What Hana, Doreen, and Trevor are doing is consistently interrupted by the older Nicky’s poring over pictures of the ones he lost and his extended guilt.
One Life is designed to reach the endpoint which is the now famous BBC segments hosted by Esther Rantzen (Samantha Spiro). To get to where Anthony Hopkins starts weeping and the audience is filled with the children he helped place, including Vera Diamontova Gissing (Frantiska Polakova and Henrietta Garden) who he discussed skiing and swimming with when she was a child. Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines who is now a member of the aristocracy. Hanuš Šnábl who returned to Prague in 1945 but eventually permanently moved to Britain as a journalist.
Anthony Hopkins is, of course, giving an excellent performance in a film which is designed to elicit some audience sniffles when he cries, but, like Winton himself, doesn’t want to really discuss what happened after that last train didn’t make it. Hopkins’ Winton is the focus. “Nicky’s Children” and the bravery of the parents, children, and Doreen and Trevor serve as background.
“Save one life and you save them all,” is the maxim the elderly Martin Blake (Jonathan Pryce in what is essentially a cameo) reiterates to Nicky. Saving 669 lives was an extraordinary achievement, but it didn’t only belong to Winton, as he keeps telling people. It’s the tenacity of the younger Winton and the humility of the elder Winton around which Hawes builds the emotional core.
One Life is a “feel good” Holocaust narrative — something which seems a tad manipulative. Of course, the world needs the “ordinary people” to step up in times of great injustice. But without Hopkins sincerely selling Nicky Winton, One Life is nothing much beyond a reverse engineering of the ‘That’s Life!’ segments. Competent but not excellent filmmaking.
