Heroes now come pumping 56-inch chests, their stories embellished and amplified over multiple platforms. Now imagine an old, grey-hair gentleman, doddering around at home, shuffling through old memories, reluctantly bringing to light a story that needs to be told, hoping the focus will not be on him.
That is what makes the little-known heroism of Nicholas Winton, an English stockbroker who played a key role in rescuing 669 children of largely Jewish descent from Prague just before Hitler started World War II, so special. Even the British only discovered him 50 years later, in 1989, when his story made it to the BBC show That’s Life!, and quickly dubbed him ‘The British Schindler’.
However, as portrayed by a marvellous Hopkins, Winton is a man as burdened by what he did, as what he could not. Those days and months leading up to the rescue have come flooding back to him now as he is cleaning up his house to make way for a coming grandchild. Now he must decide what he should do with a scrapbook containing the names, photographs, and other details of the children whose transport from Prague to Britain – through Nazi Germany – he helped organise.
Winton admits he wonders at times what happened to the children who made it, as much as he pushes away imagining what happened to those who didn’t.
It’s courtesy Hopkins’s deeply moving portrayal, and Olin’s as his supportive, understanding wife, that the post-WWII section of the film is even more effective than when the children are actually being saved from under the noses of the Gestapo.
Flynn as the younger Winton can’t evoke the same depths nor director Hawkes the needed tension — so that, while admirable, Winton and his comrades’ roles in this chapter of WWII history seems almost colourless. That goes for Bonham-Carter too, in the role of Winton’s mother, a German Jew who migrated to Britain after the First World War, who is right behind him every step of the way.
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Winton once makes a passing mention of how he wants the story out as it “remains so relevant”. Perhaps even more so now than in 1989, with the world shutting its doors to immigrants, and the next likely “leader of the free world” describing them as “animals”.
Yet, as Winton puts it, what he is doing is just the “decent” thing to do. “Save a life, save the world.”
How many can make that claim?
One Life movie cast: Anthony Hopkins, Johnny Flynn, Lena Olin, Helena Bonham Carter
One Life movie director: James Hawes
One Life movie rating: 3.5 stars
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