Stream It Or Skip It: ‘One Life’ on Paramount+, In Which Anthony Hopkins Brings His A-Game to an Otherwise Ordinary Historical Drama

One Life ( now streaming on Paramount+ ) is proof that the presence of Sir Anthony Hopkins always and without fail elevates a movie. (OK, maybe not that one Transformers movie, but at least his scenes were memorably unintentionally hilarious.) This film is more stereotypical of what we’d expect from the veteran Oscar winner, who plays the older version of real-life British gent Nicholas Winton, whose efforts to extract hundreds of Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia made him an unsung hero of World War II. Johnny Flynn ( Stardust ) plays the younger version of Winton as the film jumps between the late 1930s and 1987 – but as you’d expect, Hopkins is the one who truly carries the movie.

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The Gist: Nicholas (Hopkins) has too much stuff. Boxes and boxes of it, piled up here and there, in the den, in the garage. He’s 80-ish, and he takes it slow around their nice, spacious house, but he still drives and still dives into the pool in their lovely back garden. His wife Grete (Lena Olin) insists it’s time to get rid of some of that stuff – but they’ll find a special place for that one attache he keeps in the drawer, she promises. It’s the kind of attache that’s ripe to trigger a flashback: Young Nicholas (Flynn) visiting Prague in 1938. He visits a refugee camp where children clamor for the bit of chocolate in his pocket. A sweet girl, in spite of the harsh conditions and the dirt on her face and hands, smiles wide and shows the gap where her two front teeth are about to grow in. A 12-year-old girl looks considerably more haunted, holding a baby that isn’t her sibling or cousin but one that belongs to people who are just, well, no longer there.

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The Nazis have already pushed these people from their homes, and are on the brink of invading Prague. Something must be done about this, Nicholas insists. He can’t just return to London and resume his job as a stockbroker. He wires his boss and says he’ll be back whenever, and gets to work, recruiting humanitarians Doreen Warriner (Romola Garai) and Trevor Chadwick (Alex Sharp) to come up with a plan to extract the children to the U.K. Nicholas goes home and gets his mother (Helena Bonham Carter) to help him drum up money, visas and foster families. He pleads with British bureaucrats to be, well, less damn bureaucratic, and they put the kids’ paperwork to the top of the pile.

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Letters are written. Photos are taken. Money is raised. Promissories are penned. Typewriters go tickity-tack. Phones ring. Children say heartbreaking goodbyes to their parents as they board trains to safety. Meanwhile, in 1987, Nicholas contemplates. That is to say, he stares longingly into the distance, in between cleaning jaunts (he piles up boxes of old paperwork and burns them in the yard). He opens the attache and pulls out a scrapbook full of photos and documentation. There’s no pride or nostalgia on his face. Just – blankness? An unwillingness to open old wounds, perhaps? He takes the attache to a newspaper, and the doltish editor sends him away. This is Nicholas’ legacy. And he doesn’t know what to do with it.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: There’s some very clear parallels to Schindler’s List here.

Performance Worth Watching: Without Hopkins’ haunted nonverbal performance, One Life would be incredibly ordinary.

Memorable Dialogue: Nicholas states it plainly at the refugee camp: “I have seen this, and I cannot unsee it. And because I may be able to do something about it, I must at least try.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: One Life is a character study cloaked in the trappings of a historical drama – and thank the cinema gods it sidesteps most of the trappings of the staid biopic. The finely shot, relatively bare-bones 1930s sequences lay the groundwork for Hopkins to silently and existentially ruminate in 1987, where Nicholas very pragmatically clean-sweeps the clutter from his life and ends up finding a bit of emotional clarity in that precious briefcase. Director James Hawes shows an eye for the usual period detail, but more crucially, executes the narrative with a sense of urgency, maintaining tension as the Nazi invasion looms and using montages effectively to convey significant amounts of visual information while Lucia Zucchetti edits crisply, sharply and with clear intent. This is not at all the talky foot-dragger of a drama you may expect it to be.

Hopkins’ scenes are where the film finds its true agency, a complexity beyond the easy and simple assertions of his character’s selflessness. It’s obvious that Nicholas deserves recognition, but he may not feel quite the same. And so the actor, furrowing his brow, stirs all manner of intangibles into the screen version of Nicholas: The specter of aging, feelings of unworthiness, long-faded memories vividly returning. On top of all that, and more visibly spelled out by the screenplay, is nagging regret: Did I do enough? That notion leads to an inevitable tearjerker conclusion, one that feels less egregious after Hopkins put in all that work. This is precisely why he’s a master of the craft.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Hopkins’ thoughtful artistry, coupled with Hawes’ technical proficiency, renders One Life a thoughtful and memorable drama.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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