One Life: The Other Schindler’s List

MOVIE INFO:

Based on the book If It’s Not Impossible…: The Life of Sir Nicholas Winton by Barbara Winton, ONE LIFE tells the incredible, emotional true story of Nicholas ‘Nicky’ Winton (Johnny Flynn), a young London broker who visits Prague in December 1938. In a race against time, Winton convinces Trevor Chadwick (Alex Sharp) and Doreen Warriner (Romola Garai) of the British Committee for Refugees in Czechoslovakia to rescue hundreds of predominantly Jewish children before Nazi occupation closes the borders. Fifty years later, Nicky (Anthony Hopkins) is haunted by the fate of the children he wasn’t able to bring to safety in England. It’s not until the BBC show “That’s Life!” re-introduces him to some of those he helped rescue that he finally begins to come to terms with the guilt and grief he carried — all the while skyrocketing from anonymity to a national hero.

REVIEW:

Anthony Hopkins got his sympathetic character bits down pat. He’s so good with his shtick and line readings, his controlled silences and nano movements that most of the time you never notice the recycling. When he played, Freud in Freud’s Last Session, he basically stopped trying to do the German accent except for hello, goodbye. Jah, was a particular fallback word. Every three sentences was jah this and jah that. After an hour of this, I jah having enough.

In One Life, a milder Schindler’s List variant, Hopkins is his good old British self. He plays Nicholas Winton, an actual historical figure, who lived in modest renown in old age, but in young adulthood helped child refugees flee Czechoslovakia during World War II. The numbers were 669 children saved, with over 6,000 descendants spawned.

Hopkins is playing his gentler, kinder self, sans mannerism and silly accents. The only tic kept is the slow mindful shuffle and the quiet unadorned line readings with just the slightest hint of loneliness, regret and sorrow for things and people he couldn’t save. The set design, which features stacks and stacks of records threatening to topple over, shows how some of these regrets permeate his retired existence. The slow final cataloging, putting away, whittling down brings memories and the frame that allows Winton’s story to be told in flashback.

It’s a good performance that almost lifts One Life from its Holocaust drama cliches. It even echoes the Jewish proverb “He who saves one life saves the world” that was also the animus for Schindler’s List. Winton’s public and media nickname- the British Oskar Schindler. His super saving graces was a punctilious passion for dealing and completing perfect paperwork and the patient knowledge that allows him to exploit and marshal the loopholes of bureaucracy. The plan was too save the children by getting them out of Prague on trains and over to foster homes in the U.K. before the Nazis closed down that escape route. It worked for eight trainloads. The final ninth, that never left the station, is the one that haunts Winton’s memories.

There are obvious heart string tuggers that litter the flashbacks. Children and their parents live on the streets in makeshift tarps. They are dirty, downtrodden, starving and desperate for any saving grace. It’s all filmed with the painful manipulation of those starving children in the UNICEF ads. Too add extra poignancy, those with the most screen time become the tragic ones, the grief dete that are the basis for Winton’s remorse- the children that might have been his own but will never be. Too add to the veracity is Prague settings that still have war’s echoes. The background casting, the kids in particular, are all played by Czech actors.

The repetition of families crying, terrified children looking sad at the train station, the heart wrenching farewells amidst the fog of locomotive steam is intended to mimic newsreels and dramas of that time. It gets grinding. Eventually, I started to tune it all out- the one thing a director never wants you to do watching a holocaust drama.

However, Hopkins performance, particularly the remorse, redeems the cliches, gives One Life its emotional gut punch. At the end, after he has cleaned out his life, discards and burns the outdated and no longer valuable, he is given the I am Spartacus moment, the recognition he deserves in the ringing applause of those he saved, the thanks of them and their descendants- the family he wanted and thought was lost, but now there to comfort and be his new found family until he is ash. When all the schmaltz is true, it’s easy to forgive its existence.