The Holocaust is a subject that challenges cinema. What classic narrative structure could accommodate an honest account of such relentless barbarity? How much should be shown in what is a visual medium before what’s depicted becomes unethical (or unbearable)? And though who the villains are is obvious, who in a story like that could or should be positioned as any kind of hero figure? Such considerations invite the filmmaker to take a careful and unconventional approach; such considerations perhaps even demand those things. In the last three months, three very different films have been released concerning the Holocaust: Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, Steve McQueen’s Occupied City, and now James Hawes’ One Life. Where Glazer’s film used a banal visual language akin to reality television to render domestic life in a Nazi household nauseatingly familiar, and where McQueen’s film overlaid contemporary footage of Amsterdam with spoken horror stories of the city’s Nazi occupation, One Life is far more formally and narratively conventional.
One Life begins in 1988, as retired English banker Nicholas Winton (Anthony Hopkins) prepares to make an appearance on the BBC magazine show That’s Life!, in an edition that will acknowledge the humanitarian role he played in the run-up to World War II. Winton thinks back to 1938, when as a young stockbroker (now played by Johnny Flynn) he was involved in the Kindertransport rescue, navigating government bureaucracy to bring trains of mostly Jewish child refugees to Britain from Czechoslovakia, before Hitler’s war in Europe officially began.
Such a story takes on particular resonance right now, as governments preside over various refugee crises and a resurgent far-right the world over foments animosity towards “the other.” One Life is accessible: Hawes, a prolific director of television making his feature debut, brings the anonymous polish of popular TV drama. He mines tension from scenes of forged documents being thumbed by German soldiers—he even allows for moments of levity, particularly from Helena Bonham Carter as Winton’s mother Babi, who is repeatedly shown intimidating British government pencil-pushers into paving the way for young Nicky’s trains. One Life was seemingly made with general audiences in mind, and it may be most successful as an appeal for compassion towards displaced people generally, at a time when many could stand to hear it.
However, One Life is trickier as a film about the Holocaust, and not just because it seeks to present its imperiled peoples as both generic and Jewish. (The One Life marketing campaign has been criticized for initially going all-in on the film’s representation of its refugee crisis as a universal one, with the word “Jewish” at first omitted from publicity materials altogether.) The film is a story about the (669) lives saved rather than those (6 million) extinguished, while focus falls upon the man that the film largely credits with their rescue—shaky ethical ground for Schindler’s List 31 years ago, and no surer now.
As with The Zone of Interest and Occupied City, atrocities are not shown in One Life. Though in Hawes’ film this seems more like a choice made to keep the film palatable, the decision to keep victims’ ultimate fates off-screen—one memorable scene has Winton waiting at an empty platform for a train that never arrives—haunts the picture.
If One Life could be criticized for taking the Schindler’s List approach of telling a “successful” Holocaust story and centering a savior figure, it is also complicated by not ending with the rescue, but examining the long-term impact on the rescuer of the nagging possibility that more could have been done. Flynn, currently nearing the end of his West End run as a roaring Richard Burton in The Motive and the Cue, here mimics another member of Welsh acting royalty in quieter fashion, playing the younger Winton with a compelling gentleness and a convincing hint of Hopkins. It’s Hopkins himself, though, who impresses most, in the tougher role of the older and more troubled Winton.
Continuing a remarkable run of late-career performances, Hopkins plays Winton as an ordinary man with long-submerged trauma that’s just beginning to bubble to the surface. As in The Father and Armageddon Time, Hopkins here dual-wields outward poise and barely-concealed vulnerability to great effect. (As anyone who’s seen The Father knows, Hopkins is a powerful crier; in One Life, he again breaks down in one late scene in an almost child-like howl of anguish.) It’s hard to recall another actor who, after a comparable career—over 60 years on screen, and more than 100 films—could still serve such honesty and freshness with this sort of regularity.
Still, come the end of Winton’s story, we’re left with more questions: Is it right that a film with this subject matter should treat the emotional journey of the rescuer as the most important one? One Life’s central message is that acts of compassion reverberate across generations. There’s value to that, but should the film really end on such a triumphant note? Well-acted and competently told, One Life arrives in the wake of two of the most formally and intellectually rigorous examples of cinema yet made on the Holocaust, and it can’t help but appear a little flimsy in comparison.
Director: James Hawes
Writer: Lucina Coxon, Nick Drake
Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Johnny Flynn, Lena Olin, Romola Garai, Alex Sharp, Marthe Keller, Jonathan Pryce, Helena Bonham Carter
Release Date: March 15, 2024
Brogan Morris is a London-based freelance writer and editor, whose writing on film can also be found at the BFI, The Guardian, BBC Culture and more. You can follow him on X formerly known as Twitter at @BroganJMorris.