Writers: Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake
Director: James Hawes
The BFI London Film Festival’s American Express Gala celebrates the life of Nicholas Winton who saved 669 children by organising Kindertransport out of Czechoslovakia in the later 1930s before the Nazi invasion. Set across two time periods, the sections in the 1980s carry a greater emotional weight while the dramatised flashbacks have all the cliched hallmarks of British period-drama filmmaking set in the Second World War which loves a plucky individual fighting the system singlehanded.
In 1930s Egland, stockbroker Nicky Winton is inspired to help refugees in Czechoslovakia, visiting the country and immediately falling in with Doreen, a brisk aid worker, where he has an idea to save the children. In later life, Nicky clears out his house in Maidenhead, finding a briefcase with a scrapbook of his time in the war and looks for a place to tell the story.
James Hawes film, with a screenplay by Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake, is a highly sentimental depiction of Europe during the pre-war period in which an inspirational white saviour Brit tootles about in administratively-managed and later occupied lands to help Jewish refugees while wearing lovely knitwear. Nothing should take away from the real Winton’s efforts, but One Life applies a default British period drama template that strips agency from the people being rescued, not giving them any input into their own resistance, and inscribes it all to one heroic man who came up with a great idea that only he could effect.
As we learn from the film, Winton was extremely modest about his role in a larger chain of events, but One Life is shot on that detail. We see Winton making some phonecalls and sending his redoubtable mother played by Helena Bonham Carter to the immigration office to give the officials a telling-off so they will rubber stamp the children’s papers. Yet how Winton actually did it is lost to montage and emotional passages about poor conditions and shots of children’s faces designed to tug at the heart strings.
The film makes a much greater impact in its parallel strand, an older Nicky shyly hiding from the impact he had and reticent about the scale of his accomplishment, instead tortured by the lives he didn’t save. A final burst of publicity via television show That’s Life is incredibly moving and more time devoted to the aftermath of Winton’s time in Czechoslovakia and the psychological burden he carried throughout his life would make the film much stronger.
Anthony Hopkins is magnificent as the older Nicky, deeply affected by stories he refuses to acknowledge, unwilling to let himself imagine what happened to people he saved and the ones he didn’t. Johnny Flynn adopts some of Hopkins’ mannerisms and speech patterns in his younger incarnation with the same disaffected manner. There are smaller roles for Romola Garai as the frosty aid worker and Samamtha Spiro as Esther Rantzen but neither has time to be more than a light impression.
One Life celebrates a man who undoubtedly did a great deed and saved hundreds of lives, but the film’s overly conventional approach fails to consider the wider network of train managers, political figures and local Czech nationals who helped to make it possible.
One Life is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023.
