James Hawes (2023)
The title of James Hawes’s drama echoes the scriptural precept (written in the Quran and the Talmud) that ‘… whoever saves a life, it will be as if they saved all of humanity’. Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake’s screenplay is based on the biography of a man who saved more than one life. In the months before the outbreak of World War II, Nicholas Winton co-ordinated the rescue of 669 children, the vast majority of them Jewish, by arranging their passage from Prague to Britain and homes for them in this country. Long after the event, the operation became known as the ‘Czech Kindertransport’ and the prime mover behind it was dubbed ‘the British Schindler’. Born in Hampstead in 1909 to German-Jewish parents who had recently settled in London, Winton was a stockbroker at the time of the Kindertransport; post-war, he worked for, among other agencies, the International Refugee Organisation and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. His work in the late 1930s came to public attention only in the late 1980s. He was knighted for ‘services to humanity’ in 2003. He died twelve years later, at the astonishing age of 106.
One Life tells a heroic and an inspiring story but, until its closing stages, is frustratingly uninspired. This is due partly to the narrative structure, which alternates between events in 1938-39 and 1987-88 and, within the earlier timeframe, what happens in Prague and in London. While thirty-year-old Nicholas Winton (Johnny Flynn) is in the Czech capital, it’s his mother (Helena Bonham Carter) who forthrightly cuts through the British red tape obstructing her son’s initiative. In 1987, the septuagenarian Nicholas (Anthony Hopkins) lives in comfortable but somehow thwarted retirement in Maidenhead with his Danish wife Grete (Lena Olin). There’s little synergy between these different parts of the narrative; although it becomes a bit more focused once Nicholas and his mother are on screen together, James Hawes continues to rely too much on montages of envelopes getting sealed and opened, documents stamped, family photographs looked over – with Volker Bertelmann’s hard-working score underlining, mostly unnecessarily, the meaning of what we see. More important, the 1930s sequences, without being poorly staged or played, have a stubbornly standard-issue feel that robs them of independent life.
Things change in the film’s last half hour, through the agency of two surprising subsidiary heroes of the story, both now late and unlamented – the long-running BBC consumer affairs programme That’s Life! and Robert Maxwell. In 1988, Nicholas Winton met with Maxwell’s wife Elisabeth (played in One Life by Marthe Keller), a respected Holocaust researcher. He showed her his recently rediscovered 1938-39 scrapbook which contained the names and photographs of the children rescued from Czechoslovakia, as well as the names and addresses of families that took in these young refugees. Seeing One Life the day after the release of the Jeffrey Epstein documents cache in America made it even harder than usual to have positive feelings about the Maxwell clan; but it was Robert Maxwell, presumably with his wife’s encouragement, who contacted That’s Life! about Nicholas Winton’s efforts on behalf of Jewish children in Czechoslovakia and it was Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life! team that assisted in tracking these survivors down. Winton was invited to attend a recording of the show as a member of the studio audience and seated in the front row next to a middle-aged woman who, unknown to him, had come to Britain as one of his refugees. He was invited back for another That’s Life! programme for which the entire studio audience comprised ‘Winton’s children’ or their descendants. (The Czech youngsters who went on to distinguished careers in Britain included, by the way, the film-maker Karel Reisz and the Labour MP and subsequent peer Alf Dubs.)
‘But it’s such a silly show!’ says Grete Winton when her husband first mentions That’s Life! He doesn’t disagree with her; it’s vaguely unseemly that this was how Winton’s great achievements were brought publicly to light; and Samantha Spiro’s version of Esther Rantzen in One Life would look crude even in a quick-fire impressions show. Yet the sequences in the TV studio and Winton’s reunion with people whose lives he saved are unarguably moving and give James Hawes’s film a much-needed shot in the arm. So does the narrative’s eventual concentration on the elderly Nicholas Winton, which allows Anthony Hopkins the uninterrupted screen time he deserves. Hopkins was approaching his eighty-five birthday when the film was shot in late 2022. He has always been a gifted, charismatic performer but his work in The Father (2020) and now here is that of a master actor, creating a richly detailed personality with the minimum of evident technique. Hopkins makes you wonder if anyone has ever got to be as good on the cinema screen as he now is, at such an advanced age. (Judi Dench doesn’t really count: she was already in her sixties – and already great – by the time she started making films regularly.) Despite a less than penetrating script, Hopkins’s portrait of Nicholas Winton feels, even in the early stages of the film, real. He’s often funny, too – not least in one treasurable scene between him and Jonathan Pryce, Hopkins’s The Two Popes (2019) co-star, playing the older version of one of Winton’s colleagues in the Prague rescue effort.
The stirring effect of the last part of One Life is, of course, to render the 1930s scenes – what should be the dramatic and emotional guts of the story – all the more marginal but Hopkins’s performance makes that a price worth paying. It should be said that Johnny Flynn, though inevitably eclipsed by his senior partner in the role, does well as Winton: Flynn has warmth, blends sensitivity with single-mindedness and, without seeming to imitate Hopkins, anticipates aspects of the older man. This comes through strongly in the very last flashback to 1939. In old age, Winton is still riddled with regret that the final, 250-strong group of children due to leave Prague on 1 September 1939 was prevented from doing so by Hitler’s invasion of Poland on the same day and the outbreak of war across Europe. The stricken faces of the younger Nicholas, as he realises the implications of this, and his older self reflecting on it, are eloquently juxtaposed. Helena Bonham Carter is entertaining as Barbara (Babi) Winton and Romola Garai makes Doreen Warriner, another of the unsung British humanitarian heroes working in Prague, remarkably individual, given the material she has to work with. The same goes for Michael Gould, as a harassed British bureaucrat negotiating between the rule book and his conscience.
4 January 2024
