The unsung historical hero is irresistible, though it takes a discerning interpreter to make such a subject both relevant and moving to sensibilities that have developed in the meantime. Spielberg set the template with Schindler’s List by going big in every way. James Hawes’ One Life comes across as Schindler lite, or, more charitably, as a movie whose mood attempts to mimic the staid, unassuming character of its hero. And Nicholas Winton, played by Anthony Hopkins, really deserves to be called a hero. He rescued more than 600 Czech children, mostly Jews, from the Nazis during the months after Hitler annexed the Sudetenland but before England declared war on Germany. 

The reason we know about Winton and his exploits is because of a British TV morning variety show that invited Winton to sit in the audience of a live production where, unbeknownst to him, he was surrounded by dozens of the people he saved as children, now grown up, but had never met. It’s a very powerful sequence in the movie, even more so than the real thing, which you can easily find on YouTube. But because the TV segment is what drives the story—meaning the whole movie leads up to it—and will attract an audience, history is short-changed. Hawes creates drama by juxtaposing the excruciatingly drawn-out process of Winton securing visas for refugee children whom England didn’t want with his retired life in late 80s rural England, where he keeps busy cleaning up all the files he kept of the adventure because that was the past. A friend suggests he donate his scrapbook of the operation to the local newspaper, which doesn’t seem interested in it, and then to Betsy Maxwell (Marthe Keller), the wife of media powerhouse (and, later, convicted fraudster) Robert Maxwell, who was a Czech refugee himself. Betsy knows what to do with it, especially since her husband has deep television connections.

In the contrasting sections we see the young Winton (Johnny Flynn, a good cognate for Hopkins as he seems versed in the latter’s familiar acting tics), working with his activist mother (Helena Bonham-Carter) cajoling and begging British bureaucrats to issue the precious visas while the invading Germans are still mildly tolerant of allowing Czechs to leave the country. Though Hawes does fairly well in keeping all this paperwork-oriented plot development intriguing, he neglects to show the larger picture of how the Germans carried out the invasion and why the British were so reluctant to admit that it was an invasion—until, of course, it was too late. In its alternately leisurely and tense lead up to the money shot of Winton meeting his “children,” One Life can feel rather pedestrian, even if the stakes are life or death. 

Opens June 21 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku PIccadilly (050-6861-3011), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280).

One Life home page in Japanese

photo (c) Willow Road Films Limited. British Broadcasting Corporation 2023