Review of the film “One Life” by James Hawes

The historical drama by James Hawes, One Life, starring Anthony Hopkins, is being released. The award-winning actor played Nicholas Winton, the “British Schindler” who organized the evacuation of 669 Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Tells Julia Shagelman.

Many must have come across a video that circulated on the Internet several years ago: a handsome elderly man sits among the audience in a television studio, and suddenly the presenter announces that the rest of the viewers, most of whom are also middle-aged, are grown-up children whose lives he once -saved, but most of them had never met him. There is applause, tears appear in the eyes – this is a happy ending to an incredible story, which does not become less touching because we have seen similar ones on film or television screens many times. James Hawes’ film even features a quote from the Talmud: “He who saves one life saves the whole world,” familiar to millions of viewers from Schindler’s List (1993).

Unlike the German industrialist, who was initially guided by cynical calculation in his rescue of the Jews, young stockbroker Nicholas (then Nicky) Winton (Johnny Flynn) takes on a good cause simply out of an inability to sit idly by when disaster is happening around him. In 1938, he came to Prague immediately after the annexation of the Sudetenland by Germany. The city is overrun with refugees living in terrible conditions, but Nicky’s acquaintances, Doreen (Romola Garai) and Trevor (Alex Sharp) from the British Refugee Committee, do not have enough time to deal with each unfortunate person: they barely have time to rescue people who are being persecuted by the Nazis for political views. Everyone says that the Nazis will not stop in the Sudetenland, a big war is coming soon, and then Niki, at her own peril and risk, decides that at least the children need to be helped.

He gets down to business with accounting precision, contacting the right authorities, involving migration service officials, organizing a press campaign, fundraising and searching for foster families for children. He is helped in this by his mother (the regal but passionate Helena Bonham Carter), herself a Jew who emigrated from Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century, who, in a conversation with another bureaucrat, reminds him of the values ​​that Britain declares as its own: dignity and respect for others. Together, they, Doreen, Trevor and Czech volunteer Hana (Juliana Moska), manage to send eight trainloads of children from Prague. Just before the departure of the ninth, already under steam, Britain announces its entry into the war, the Nazis delay the train, and the operation ends. The following pages in Nicky’s journal, where he keeps track of those rescued, remain forever blank.

The authors of the film, based on the book by Winton’s daughter, frame this story as the memoirs of almost 80-year-old Nicholas (Anthony Hopkins). Fifty years after his first trip to Prague, at the request of his wife (Lena Olin), he clears away the rubble of old things and documents in the house in order to put it in order for the birth of his first grandson. So he stumbles upon the very magazine that he kept in his desk drawer all these years, without telling anyone about his “Kindertransport”, and decides to make this information public – again not for his own sake, but in order to preserve the memory of the survivors and the dead.

The main conflict of the film is immediately indicated: it lies not outside, in the fight against the Nazis, who appear here as an unconditional, but almost invisible evil, but inside Nicholas himself, who has been tormented all his life by regret that he did not have time to do more. Closing his eyes, he sees in front of him the faces not of those children whom he was able to take out, but of those who remained on the Prague platform on September 1, 1939.

James Hawes has worked in television since the mid-1980s, having worked on series such as A Quite English Murder, Doctor Who, Black Mirror and Slow Horses, among others. “One Life” is his feature-length debut, which in general also looks like a high-quality television production, but not striking with unexpected artistic decisions. It is primarily the acting that lifts it above this level, especially Bonham Carter and, above all, Hopkins himself, who plays with colors that are less bright but just as effective. He endows his hero not only with unfeigned modesty, but also with gentle humor, and most importantly, with unwavering decency, which in the darkest times turns into courage and makes one believe: if such people exist in the world, perhaps he is truly worthy of salvation.