‘One Life’: Toronto Review

Dir: James Hawes. UK. 2023. 110mins

There is a famous clip of a 1988 episode of popular BBC magazine show That’s Life, in which an elderly man, Nicholas Winton, is dumbstruck to find he is sharing the studio audience with the now grown-up children he rescued from war-torn Czechoslovakia, some 50 years previously. It’s only a short snippet, but it hums with emotion. In mounting his biopic of Winton’s life, focusing on him as an idealistic 20-something in 1938 and a more jaded septuagenarian in the late 1980s, director James Hawes works extremely hard to match the raw power of that clip. This is an undeniably moving story, and Winson — who died in 2015 aged 106 — a man worth honouring, but One Life comes across as an orchestrated tearjerker. 

A layered performance from Hopkins as a man who keeps the past locked up tight

Premiering at Toronto before heading to London, this See-Saw Films production will release theatrically in the UK by Warners Bros on January 1, 2024, where it should attract a healthy audience thanks to its true life story and the presence of Antony Hopkins at the head of the cast. That should also stand it in good stead elsewhere; it is a prestige, appealing package.

Adapted from the book ‘If It’s Not Impossible’, written by Winton’s daughter Barbara — who collaborated with the production until her death midway through the film’s principal photography — screenwriters Lucinda Coxon (The Danish Girl) and Nick Drake have split Winton’s life into two key periods, fluidly stitched together by editor Lucia Zucchetti. In 1938, as played by Johnny Flynn, he is an idealistic 29-year-old of German/Jewish heritage, visiting Prague to undertake some charity work (the film shot both there and in the UK). Appalled by what he finds, families living in squalor having fled the increasing Nazi threat in Germany and Austria, he decides to do something about it. Against the odds, he and members of the British Committee for Refugees in Czechoslovakia  — including Doreen Warriner (Romola Garai) and Trevor Chadwick (Alex Sharp) — together with Winton’s influential mother Babi (Helena Bonham Carter), rescue a total of 669 children from almost certain death, bringing them to new homes in the UK.

Fifty years later, Winton lives a modest life in England with his Danish wife Grete (Lena Olin), keeping his remarkable feat under almost defensive wraps, tormented by thoughts of the hundreds he simply could not save. Despite the propulsive authenticity of the Prague-set sequences — the production team used Winton’s own scrapbooks, featured in the film, to achieve an impressive level of period detail, and cinematographer Zac Nicholson captures the panic and desperation with fidgety handheld camera —  it’s the 1980s scenes which are the most arresting.

Here the camera spends a lot more time in close-up on Winton’s face, a lifetime of memories playing under the surface. It is a measured, layered performance from Hopkins as a man who keeps the past locked up tight because to confront it is simply too painful. He is taciturn, reflective and  humble, but also clearly suffering from his own kind of post traumatic stress; something that is often ignored when it comes to saviour narratives. When the ‘That’s Life’ moment inevitably comes towards the end of the film, recreated in painstaking detail and populated by some of the real-life survivors, it’s a moment of catharsis, of relief and redemption.

As the younger Winton, Flynn may have boundless energy and optimism, but he also demonstrates traits that will be reflected in the older man; a frustration with bureaucracy — in order to obtain visas for these refugee children, Winston is told he must find each one a foster family and £50, no mean feat — and a need to simply get on with the job at hand, with minimal fuss or fanfare. ‘I’m a European, I’m a socialist,” he says simply, when asked why he would take on such a task, and it’s impossible not to graft these words, and this experience, onto the modern refugee crisis; particularly that facing Ukraine.  That sentiment underscores One Life, giving it more power, perhaps, than Volker Bertelmann’s stirring score or the repeated lingering framing on innocent young faces.