ONE LIFE (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

One Life, Bleecker Street

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 14, 2024

One Life tells the story of a hero so humble that he doesn't seem to think he even is one. That makes for an intriguing character, but Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake's screenplay, which switches back and forth between the man's past heroics and present-day evasion of them, doesn't know what to do with him.

This is obviously based on a true story, and Nicholas Winton, the main subject of this dramatization, was largely responsible for saving the lives of a certain number of children from Czechoslovakia before and after the Nazi occupation of that country. The number, apparently, must remain a mystery here, if only because the movie is so indecisive about how to play this material that it constantly makes us uncertain if Winton's efforts were successful and which of the children seeking safety in England actually made it there.

This is a strange way to present this material, not only because the historical record exists, but also because part of the narrative takes place at a time when Winton's actions are, to some degree, a matter of historical record. It's one of many of the screenwriters and director James Hawes' blatant efforts to generate suspense, and the method doesn't quite sit right, considering that this is a matter of life or death for people whose own stories are simply used to prop up this one man's story.

Ignoring that, though, the movie has a more foundational narrative issue, and that's simply how little our main character has to do in and with about half of the story here. That half-or-so belongs to an older Nicky (Anthony Hopkins), who's nearly 80 and living in a small English town in the late 1980s (One of the encouraging facts we learn at the end is that the real Winton made it to 106).

He doesn't do much with his life at this point, having retired, except to listen to and complain about the stock report and the news in the morning, dilly-dally around his home during the day, and watch television at night. His wife Grete (Lena Olin) is heading out of town for a few days, leaving Nicky to himself and to be checked in on occasionally by the couple's daughter—who's about to give them their first grandchild, by the way. She only asks that her husband tidy up his office, which has become a repository for assorted papers and old documents and a monogrammed briefcase with initials that aren't his. Grete knows the case means a lot to Nicky, so she makes sure to note that he must find it a proper home.

So much of this story, then, is presented as an unnecessary mystery almost from the beginning. Instead of pulling us into Nicky's life and actions, it adds a distancing effect, because we can feel the ways in which Coxon and Drake hide, hold back on, or otherwise confuse key pieces of information. The story eventually splits in two, following the elder Nicky as he looks for a home for the briefcase and a younger Nicky (played by Johnny Flynn) starting about a year and a half before the official start of World War II.

Outraged by the refugee crisis started with Germany's annexation of Austria and the lack of any response from his or any country, Nicky decides to put his life and job as a stockbroker on hold to visit Czechoslovakia, which appears to be next on the Nazis' list of countries to overtake. Finding many displaced families or orphaned children crammed together inside or next to a makeshift housing facility, Nicky arrives in Prague to find only a few fellow British citizens and local volunteers working to get these children out of the country. Enlisting his mother (played by Helena Bonham Carter) to begin working with an immigration official on how to bring these kids to England, the amount of necessary paperwork is almost as daunting a task as anything else.

There's little denying that the real Winton was a hero, but even by the account of his character here, his work was only part of a larger operation, performed by others who had much more to risk and lose than he ever did. The movie certainly acknowledges these other players, as they remain or continue to live in Prague and organize multiple trains with groups of dozens or hundreds of refugee children aboard. However, the movie remains Nicky's story and, with scene after scene of the younger man arranging documents and older man avoiding direct talk of the mission, and never justifies why it fully is, apart from the luck that he's the last surviving member of this rescue operation.

The man's humility and apparent incapacity for even a hint of self-aggrandizement, though, do pay off in the most powerful moment of One Life, a re-creation of a TV appearance that gained international attention (and still makes the rounds online every so often). It's a genuinely affecting moment, until one realizes the only trick the filmmakers have to follow it up—and for the whole movie, for that matter—is to do the same thing again.

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