Back in 2012, I brought a fascinating docudrama to Hong Kong that both wowed and moved audiences. NICKY’S FAMILY told the then little-known story (outside of the UK, at any rate) of Nicholas Winton and his heroic efforts in bringing 669 Czech children, most of whom were Jewish, to safety in England in the weeks and days leading up to the start of WWII. Known as the Kindertransport, both the children’s and Winton’s story was relegated to the footnotes of history for nearly 50 years until Winton showed his scrapbook to Elisabeth Maxwell, the wife of newspaper publisher Robert Maxwell. One thing led to another and Winton was asked to be in the audience of the very popular British TV show, THAT’S LIFE! What he didn’t know at the time was that sitting next to him was 60-year-old Vera Gissing (born Věra Diamantová), who was one of the children whose life he helped save fifty years earlier. It was an emotional reunion not just for Winton and Gissing, but also for the millions of people who were watching it live on their tellies. Both that event and Winton’s story are retold in the new film, ONE LIFE.

It’s 1938 and 29-year-old London stockbroker Nicholas Winton (Johnny Flynn, OPERATION MINCEMEAT; THE DIG) gets a phone call from his good friend, Martin Blake. Blake tells Winton about all the people who are flooding into Prague in the wake of the Munich Agreement that saw Nazi Germany annex the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia. Winton immediately flies there and sees for himself the humanitarian crisis that is quickly unfolding. Like many others, Winton believes that Hitler won’t just stop there. Emboldened by his success, he will continue to march through Europe seizing territory and planting the Nazi flag wherever he goes. For these internally displaced refugees, most of whom are Jewish, Hitler has made it very clear that there will be no place for them in the Third Reich. With only a few exceptions, no country is willing to take these people in. With the help of his highly resourceful mother, Babi (Helena Bonham Carter, OCEAN’S 8; TV’s THE CROWN), Winton quickly musters the resources to bring some of these refugee children to England before the world falls into chaos. Fifty years later, 79-year-old Winton (Anthony Hopkins, THE FATHER) is cleaning his home office of all his papers from that turbulent time in his life.

With what’s going on these days with all the refugees and immigrants coming to the West as well as the war in Ukraine, I suppose that the timing of this film should come as no surprise to anyone. Clearly, writers Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake had both events on their minds when they adapted the book, “If It’s Not Impossible…The Life of Sir Nicholas Winton”, by Winton’s daughter Barbara. Indeed, the story goes to great lengths to stress that not all these children were Jewish when the reality was that Winton’s efforts were focused on rescuing Jewish children who were at far greater risk than their gentile counterparts. Particularly irksome, to my my Jewish ears at any rate, was the fact that not one person invokes the “J” word until 20 minutes into the film. This, too, should not be surprising as the producer is BBC Film, an organisation that has an inglorious reputation for being anti-Semitic. When the film was released in the UK in January, BBC promotional material conveniently left off the word “Jewish” from its synopsis of the film. Needless to say, a backlash ensued and BBC Film was shamed into correcting its glaring error.

On the plus side, both Flynn and Winton do excellent work bringing Winton back to life with Flynn capturing Winton’s can-do spirit and Hopkins showing the man’s humility. Bonham Carter may be the film’s brightest spot though, with her brilliant German-tinged British accent. If this story is anything to go by, Nicholas and Babi were quite the formidable team. Perhaps the best parts of the film are the recreated scenes from THAT’S LIFE. (If you haven’t seen the originals yet, they’re on YouTube.) If Winton’s reunion with Gissing doesn’t put a lump in your throat, nothing will.

Even with its solid performances and the money shots, ONE LIFE is still not a boundary. (That’s a cricket reference, in case you don’t know.) The big problem is that young Nicky’s story is more interesting than old Nicky’s, but when you’ve got one of world’s greatest actors alive playing old Nicky, you just can’t relegate him to a bit part. As a result, the movie spends far too much time on Winton schlepping boxes of papers around and having conversations with people in his life that are rather inconsequential to the meat of the story. The scenes at the train station in Prague are also undercooked. While most of these children were told by their parents that they’d be going on a short trip and the family would be reunited again soon, the reality was that the older children knew it was a lie, and both the younger children and the parents were traumatised by the very real possibility that there would be no family reunion in the future. In the film, the vast majority of the children are sullen but quite accepting of the situation in which they are finding themselves. A bit more heart-wrenching drama would have been helpful here.

ONE LIFE opens in Hong Kong tomorrow (March 21st). As an introduction to Nicholas Winton’s story, it does the job. However, if you want a more accurate depiction of Winton and the Kindertransport, take a look for NICKY’S FAMILY from 2011. Alternatively, there’s the 1996 documentary, MY KNEES WERE JUMPING: REMEMBERING THE KINDERTRANSPORTS.

Thanks for reading but don’t be a lurker! If you liked what you just read, here are some suggestions:

Sign up to receive my movie reviews in your inbox automatically
Share this review on your Facebook page
Leave me a message telling me what you thought of my review or the film
Bookmark the site and visit often
Like my Howard For Film Facebook page
Watch my reviews on my YouTube page
Check out my Howard For Film magazine on Flipboard
Tell your friends about the site