Veteran TV director James Hawes makes his first jump to feature filmmaking with One Life and, though an upwards ambition is always commendable, it’s hard to see the point of the transition. This competent but utterly unremarkable biopic of the humbly heroic Kindertransport organiser Nicholas Winton is something that would feel far more at home on BBC 1 on a Sunday night than it does on the big screen, unable to tackle its story in anything other than the most boringly straightforward and oddly un-moving way.
Played by Johnny Flynn as a younger man and Anthony Hopkins in his old age, Winton was one of those figures who only really emerge in times of immense crisis – a London bank employee who saw the plight of refugees in Czechoslovakia in 1938 as the Nazis closed in and decided that he couldn’t just stand by and bear witness. Naturally, the more interesting segment of the film takes place in 1938, as Winton, with the help of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia and a trusted band of supporters back in London, organises the trains, visas, and foster families to bring 669 Czechoslovakian children (many Jewish) to the safety of the UK.
Here, Hawes and writers Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake have some real drama to play with and – though the filmmaking, the script, and the acting are all very middle of the road – the inherent emotiveness of this story does shine irresistibly through at times, while carrying a timely message of how world governments could always be doing more to support refugees. With that said, even this segment could have used more urgency and punch, while some of the dialogue is outright groan-worthy, solid actors like Romola Garai as the head of BCRC and Helena Bonham Carter as Winton’s morally clear-eyed mother doing their best to elevate this material.
It’s a generic but stirring-enough World War 2 tale, but the real problems arrive whenever we cut back to the late ‘80s to meet the aged Hopkins version of Winton. Of course, this is all building to the famous, and undeniably moving, episode of the old variety show That’s Life, in which Winton was invited to share his story before being surprised by a reunion with some of children he had helped to save all those decades before. This scene is handled very nicely by Hopkins, but the problem is how long we have to wait to get there.
Absolutely nothing else happens in this half of the film, even Hopkins unable to generate any spark in what is, frankly, an incredibly boring gaggle of scenes that cannot escape the feeling of stalling for time. Here, again, One Life feels more made for TV than a full-length film; with 30 minutes cut from the runtime, this interminable plot strand would be much less aggravating. There can be no doubting that Nicholas Winton was a remarkable man, certainly one worthy of a splashy movie telling his story, but a film about the early days of the Holocaust should absolutely not be as uninvolving as One Life is.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 