“Save one life, save the world”: Taken from Talmudic writing, it’s the animating idea behind this historical drama and the inspiration for its title – a title that, in turns, represents an astonishing understatement, and accidentally diagnoses the thing most getting in the way of its success as a compelling work of adaptation.
Based on the book If It’s Not Impossible…The Life of Sir Nicholas Winton, written by Winton’s daughter Barbara and adapted to screen by Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake, One Life begins with Nicky Winton (Hopkins) in 1988, at an advanced age and reflecting on the now-forgotten work he did before the war. That work – when Nazi Germany’s terrible warpath drove tens of thousands of refugees to flee to a still-unoccupied Prague – makes up the film’s 1938 sections. Here, Nicky (played as a young man by Flynn) is a mild-mannered, London-based stock broker moved to act after visiting a refugee camp in Prague. He joins the efforts of the British Committee for Refugees From Czechoslovakia and creates a special division specifically to evacuate children, mostly Jewish, to foster homes in England, well aware that the clock is ticking and Hitler’s invasion imminent.
The film is quite gripping in its attention to the bureaucratic hurdles and mind-boggling logistics that Nicky and soon his mother (Bonham Carter), a German-Jewish refugee herself, must surmount to start moving children to safety. But the emphasis on Nicky’s perspective, in two different timelines, hardly leaves any time left over to individuate the children or properly dramatize the terrible choice their parents have to make. This is Nicky’s movie – and now we’re back to the question of the title again – and the characterization of this not terribly demonstrative man, by Flynn and Hopkins both, is interior to the edge of inert. That is, to a point, the point of the thing – Nicky is an ordinary man who rose to the occasion; indeed, the whole of history points to the essentialness of loads and loads of ordinary people doing right and doing good and even just doing decent, and that effort by ordinary people is by and large what keeps humanity from toppling over the brink. Still, there’s something a little pious about how resistant the film is to portraying Nicky not just as an admirable character but as an interesting one, too.
One Life picks up when the action shifts firmly to the Eighties. (In depicting that terribly tacky decade, you see a little more of the pep James Hawes exhibited directing season one of the bang-up spy yarn Slow Horses.) Slowly, the world wakes up to the work Nicky and his colleagues did with the Prague refugees, which results in a strange-but-true appearance on a BBC program that connects Nicky with one survivor, and then more and more. And we circle back to the title once again – this constitutes a spoiler, apologies – for the more significant number to reflect on is the 669 lives that were saved via that kindertransport. By the time that fact – that impact, its enormity – is revealed, well, it was waterworks city for me.
This article appears in SXSW 2024 Festival Guide, Part II.
