One Life
Verdict: Timely tribute to a timeless hero
The European premiere of One Life at the London Film Festival this week felt remarkably timely.
James Hawes’s drama is about the best of humanity, which arrives as we continue to digest news about the worst of humanity.
More specifically, in a week in which hundreds of Jewish Children have been massacred, here is a tale about hundreds of Jewish children being saved, thanks to the tireless efforts of numerous people, but above all a London stockbroker called Nicholas Winton, played in old age by Sir Anthony Hopkins and as a young man by Johnny Flynn.
The film’s title is lifted from an old Hebrew proverb which suggests that ‘if you save one life you save the world’.
Its narrative flits back and forth between the late 1930s and the late 1980s. In 1938 and 1939, we see Winton spearheading British attempts to extract children from the Czech capital Prague ahead of a German invasion that everyone knew was imminent.
Johnny Flynn as a young Nicholas Winton in the film One Life
Anthony Hopkins plays an older Winton in the film about hundreds of Jewish children being saved
Fifty years later, living in comfortable retirement in Maidenhead, he is encouraged by his wife (Lena Olin) to clear out reams of old papers, re-igniting memories of the eight train loads of refugees that he, and others, managed to save from the Nazis.
Hopkins gives a lovely, sensitive performance, and the famous 1988 edition of the BBC show That’s Life!, when Winton sits in the audience unaware that everyone around him is a former child refugee whose survival he ensured, is beautifully dramatised.
The actual clip, readily available on YouTube, is deeply moving. But the film (with Samantha Spiro as a credible Esther Rantzen) somehow makes it even more of a tearjerker.
In truth I was glad that the lights didn’t go up too soon afterwards. It gave my cheeks time to dry.
The dramatic heart of the story, of course, is the monumental effort to get the children out.
In 1938, Winton travels to Prague and persuades the tough, acerbic head of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, Doreen Warriner (Romola Garai), that they should focus on the most vulnerable.
He also enlists the help, back in London, of his formidable German-born mother Babette (an imperious Helena Bonham Carter).
When she bustles off to speak to a fellow at the Foreign Office, he asks loftily where she has come from. ‘From Hampstead,’ she replies, drily. ‘On the 24 bus.’
Winton’s campaign is soon in danger of being strangled by red tape. The British government insists on a £50 bond, a visa, a medical certificate and a host family lined up, for every child.
Winton’s German-born mother Babette is played by Helena Bonham Carter
