'One Life': Anthony Hopkins magnificent as a man who kept his WWII heroism under wraps

If you Google “Sir Nicholas Winton TV show,” you’ll be a click away from a YouTube clip from a 1988 episode of the BBC talk show “That’s Life” in which the man who organized the rescue of some 669 children in World War II was honored by the host and was informed that the woman sitting next to him in the studio audience was one of the people he had helped save. The host then said, “May I ask, is there anyone in our audience tonight who owes their life to Nicholas Winton?”, at which point two dozen people in the stands stood up.

Little wonder the clip has some 42 million views; it’s an iconic television moment, sure to move your heart. Now comes the inspirational and unabashedly sentimental biopic “One Life,” which tells the story of the events that led to that TV clip.

Anthony Hopkins turns in yet another world-class performance as the older Nicholas Winton in the late 1980s, and Johnny Flynn rises to the challenge of playing the younger Nicholas in the flashback sequences that are set in the late 1930s and make up roughly half the film.

Director James Hawes and screenwriters Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake (adapting a biography of Winton written by his daughter, Barbara) find just the right balance in toggling back and forth between the urgent and tense scenes in the Europe of the 1930s and the portrait of Nicholas in his later years, when he is finally ready to share his previously unknown story with the world.

This is every inch the prestige Brit biopic, from the use of certain visuals as transitions to the lush and rousing music by Oscar-winning composer Volker Bertelmann aka Hauschka (“All Quiet on the Western Front”) to the sometimes heavy-handed messaging in the dialogue, but the story of the man who came to be known as “The British Oskar Schindler” is deserving of the reverent biography treatment, and who better than Anthony Hopkins to tell us that story?

“One Life” opens with Hopkins’ Nicholas, a retired stockbroker, enjoying a comfortable life at a lovely home in Maidenhead, England, in 1987, with his wife Grete (the always wonderful Lena Olin), who gently gets on Nicholas’ case about finally clearing out the clutter in his office, which has spilled into other areas of the home. Also: It’s time for Nicholas to decide what he’s going to do with the scrapbook inside an old leather briefcase — the scrapbook that contains photos and newspaper articles and records pertaining to the 669 Jewish Czech children he and his colleagues saved from the Nazis just before all hell broke loose in Prague. Surely, a museum or a library would be interested?

Cut to 1938, with Johnny Flynn as the young Nicholas Winton, a successful broker at the London Stock Exchange who heads to Prague to see if there’s anything he can do to help with the efforts to help families who are trying to leave before Hitler invades. When Nicholas arrives at the emergency aid organization run by Doreen Warriner (Romola Garai), Trevor Chadwick (Alex Sharp) and Marta Diamontova (Antonie Formanová), they’re almost amused by his naivete as Winton makes noise about raising the funds and obtaining the paperwork to facilitate the evacuation of hundreds of children — but they’re soon all-in. They risk their lives and work tirelessly to eventually fill eight trains with children who will have to pass through Nazi-occupied territory to make it to Britain. (Helena Bonham Carter is a force as Winton’s mother in London, who is of course deeply worried about her son taking so many chances but supports him every step of the way.)

Bleecker Street

Winton, like Schindler, is consumed with doing everything he can to save as many lives as possible — but it’s the ones he couldn’t protect that haunt him. Just as the ninth train is about to leave the station, the Nazis arrive and commandeer it, and we know those children and their guides will almost certainly never be seen again.

Johnny Flynn portrays the young Nicholas as a mild-mannered but fiercely determined and self-described “ordinary man” who does extraordinary things in a time of crushing intensity, while Hopkins conveys Nicholas’ gratitude for a long and prosperous life — the love between Winton and Grete is so beautifully portrayed — and anguish of memories from a half-century earlier.

I’ll leave it to the film to outline how Winton comes to be on that TV show and say only that the depiction of events adheres quite closely to the true story. At the age of 86, Anthony Hopkins remains at the top of his game; as his work in “One Life” reminds us, he’s one of the finest actors in the history of film.