ONE LIFE (Cert. PG) is about ordinary people graced into doing extraordinary things, none more so than Sir Nicholas Winton, who pioneered the Kindertransport: trains that enabled 669 Jewish children to escape the Holocaust.
The younger version of this self-effacing man is played by Johnny Flynn, but the acting honours will undoubtedly go to Anthony Hopkins as the now retired stockbroker who, in 1987, reluctantly opens a scrapbook containing pictures and documents relating to those he saved. The film cuts to early, pre-war 1939. Winton visits a friend in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, where Jewish children, hungry and cold, are detained in camps. “How will they survive?” he asks. “They probably won’t,” comes the reply.
It is enough to spur him into action, not just arranging the necessary documentation (by fair means or forgery), but persuading a reluctant British government to accept these refugees. Strenuous efforts are made by Winton, his German-born mother, Babi (a feisty Helena Bonham Carter), and numerous volunteers.
Parents, in an act of self-sacrifice, bid their children (who are unaware of what will befall their relatives) a final farewell at the station. The scene is heartbreaking enough without the director James Hawes’s decision to include lingering close-ups of clasped hands gradually releasing those of loved ones.
What is equally agonising is the pain the older Nicholas has carried all his subsequent life. In interviews over the years, Sir Nicholas protested that there was too much dwelling on the past. The way Hopkins plays it here, however, we see a man who continues to be haunted by regret for those he failed to save. We feel his pain mainly through the spaces between the words. It is a tear-jerking performance, one that illustrates the difference between the various Kindertransport documentaries, which are about reportage, and what a fine actor can establish with an audience, i.e. rapport.
Anthony Hopkins plays the older Nicholas Winton in One Life
Occasionally, the pacing of the film becomes somewhat pedestrian, which, in a sense, reflects the mundane, often painstaking efforts of those exercising compassion. Any religious beliefs giving impetus to their actions are well underplayed.
One Life gives some attention to Joseph Hertz, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Empire. He opposed the Kindertransport if Jewish children ended up in Gentile homes. Winton himself had been born to Jewish parents. The whole family converted to Christianity, and he was baptised in the Church of England. As an adult, he discarded a specific faith in favour of an ethical approach to life, one clearly influenced by his Judaeo-Christian upbringing.
A set piece of the film could defy belief if it weren’t true and accessible on YouTube. Esther Rantzen interviewed Winton in 1988 on her That’s Life television programme. In the movie Samantha Spiro re-enacts the occasion and invites people in the audience who were Kindertransport children to stand up. Everyone gets to their feet. This is not really a spoiler, as knowing that this happens will no more prevent a dabbing of the eyes for us than it did for Sir Nicholas. Publicly recognising what he’d done for the least of his brethren is truly a sheep-and-goats parabolic moment.