FILM: One Life

 

One Life presents the inspirational story of Nicholas Winton, a young Englishman who visits Prague in 1938 to help with a refugee organization, and is horrified to witness the plight of hundreds of Jewish families with young children fleeing from Hitler. Despite the seemingly impossible challenge of finding money and sponsors and moving the English immigration bureaucracy, he organizes the rescue of hundreds of children in the weeks and days before Hitler invades Czechoslovakia. After the war, his efforts were generally unknown, and he personally felt very burdened with the memory of all of the children that he was unable to save. The film cuts between showing the events of his heroic efforts just before the war, and then his life some four decades later. Anthony Hopkins gives a masterfully nuanced performance as the guilt-ridden Winton in his later years, in a role that could have been maudlin in lesser hands. Helena Bonham Carter is also pitch perfect as his mother in the 1938 scenes. While the film is inevitably compared to Schindler’s List, it is its own unique story, and a very timely one, in illustrating the plight of refugees in a war zone, and the genius of boldness to do what might seem impossible. The film’s title, One Life, alludes to the Jewish proverb that saving one life is to save the whole world, but it also shows what difference one life can make. You may walk out after this film wondering, as I did, what you could be doing with your one life.