One Life
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: PG
Run Time: 1 hour 5 minutes
Stars: Anthony Hopkins, Johnny Flynn, Lena Olin, Helena Bonham Carter
Writers: Lucinda Coxon, Nick Drake, Barbara Winton
Director: James Hawes
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
By now, we should treasure every moment we have in the company of Anthony Hopkins, an actor who has, since the days of black-and-white television, probed the secrets of humanity with sometimes awful precision; a brain surgeon who operates by way of the heart.
Hopkins’ late career has been distinguished by roles that explore the fine art of looking backward. He was nominated for an Oscar in 2020 as a reflective pontiff in The Two Popes and won the thing at age 83 as a memory-challenged patriarch in The Father, making him the oldest competitive Oscar winner in history.
And here he is in One Life, etching the portrait of Nicky Winton, an otherwise nondescript London broker who, as a young man at the outbreak of World War II, engineered the rescue of more than 600 children, mostly Jewish, from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.
Hopkins portrays Winton in 1988, at once understandably proud of what was accomplished 50 years earlier, yet haunted by the knowledge that he’d been forced to leave hundreds, and perhaps thousands, more children behind when the Nazis tightened their noose around Prague.
The young actor Johnny Flynn — who played Ian Fleming in the intriguing 2021 war drama Operation Mincemeat — is pleasingly earnest as 1938 Nicky, pounding the pavement in London and Prague as he desperately tries to beat the clock, enlisting the essential assistance of his resourceful mum, played by the always-wonderful Helena Bonham Carter.
Young Nicky is driven by the urgency of the moment. For old Nicky, that urgency is replaced by a lingering sense of failure; of having somehow missed an obvious detail that just might have enabled him to usher one last train out from under the Nazi death cloud.
Now, long-retired Nicky shuffles around his suburban home, thick folders of yellowed World War II-era documents under his arm. His long-suffering wife, Grete (The Unbearable Lightness of Being’s Lena Olin), gently urges Nicky to clear the papers and scrapbooks from his cluttered office; it’s a task he reluctantly undertakes, quietly fearing that, with their departure, he will finally be forced to let go of the troubled past to which he clings.
That chore, however, ultimately results in a television producer getting ahold of one of Nicky’s old scrapbooks.
It’s no spoiler to tell what happens next; the film’s trailers give it away: Invited to the taping of a TV show, Nicky sits in the studio audience unaware that he is in the presence of living, breathing proof of his immeasurable impact.
What happens next is, in acting terms, little short of miraculous. Cinematically, the scene practically screams for a sobbing breakdown — that’s certainly what’s happening to those of us watching. But Hopkins, who’s proven in the past that he can howl with the best of them, has Nicky cast his gaze upon his life’s work — then simply lower his head, lift his glasses and push away a single tear.
For anyone who grew up in the presence of a Greatest Generation hero and experienced their quiet witness to how they saved the world, the moment is nothing short of devastating.
“This acting thing is really quite easy,” Hopkins once told me in an interview. “You don’t really need to research anything. Everything you need to know is right there in the script.”
With all due respect, that’s about half true. Living an observant life is the most profound sort of research anyone can do. And in the academy of observing and portraying lives, Anthony Hopkins is the tenured professor.
Become a Saturday Evening Post member and enjoy unlimited access. Subscribe now
