ONE LIFE: An Anthony Hopkins WWII Drama That Will Get You In The End

Opening wide today at a theater, multiplex, or likewise venue near you:

ONE LIFE (Dir. James Hawes, 2023)

The first half of this film, the feature film debut by television director James Hawes (Doctor Who, Inside Story), is well-made (and well-meaning), and very watchable, but a fairly standard World War II story about fleeing the Nazis, and escaping the holocaust.

 

But, via the strong performances of Anthony Hopkins as the elder version of the British banker, Nicholas Winton, a humanitarian stockbroker who helped hundreds of Czechoslovakian children to escape from Prague; and Johnny Flynn, who portrays the younger Winton, the film grows more and more compelling until its very satisfying ending.

 

Hawes’ film, based on the book, If It’s Not Impossible…The Life of Sir Nicholas Winton by Barbara Winton, and scripted by Lucinda Coxon, and Nick Drake (not the folk singer of “Pink Moon” fame), begins with Hopkins’ Winton cleaning his study in 1987, and reflecting on a scrapbook he kept with information about the many Jewish children that he took part in relocating in 1938.

 

This leads to heavy flashbacks in which we see Flynn’s noble, determined Winton work with his co-workers (including Romola Garai as Doreen Warriner, and Alex Sharp as Trevor Chadwickof) of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, and his posh mother, Babi (Helena Bonham Carter, who gets one sharp, effective speech) to help scores of scared kids to board trains to the safety of foster families in England. These scenes are the movie’s most tense moments, you know because of grim, paper-checking Nazis.

 

Hawes cuts back and forth from the two time periods, maybe a bit too hastily as some shots and scenes aren’t given much room to breathe, but it’s Hopkins’ narrative, which involves the retiree trying to figure out what to do with his documents (donate them to the Holocaust Museum? Try for a newspaper retrospective?) that shines the brightest as it finds our hero being celebrated on the BBC series, That’s Life (which Winton’s wife, played superbly by Lena Olin calls “a very silly show”), and meeting a number of the people, and their families, who owe their life to the humble humanitarian. 

 

ONE LIFE, which takes its title from the expression, “If you can save just one life, it's worth it,” would’ve probably been celebrated much more greatly itself in a different era, as there’s been so many WWII films (and so many Anthony Hopkins historical dramas), but it’s such an earnest, and straightforward tale of humanity at its best while the world is at its worst, that it shouldn’t be dismissed. 

 

Its conclusion is so emotionally well-executed that if you don’t well up at least a little while viewing it, you might not be hooked up right. But if it doesn’t get anywhere near pulling your heart-strings, maybe one can at least see that it brilliantly shows what benefits may come when you de-clutter your office.

More later...