Anthony Hopkins has had an up-and-down career ever since winning the Academy Award for playing Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Sometimes, he picks some good roles, and other times not so much. Eventually, he won a second Academy Award for his role as a man with dementia in The Father, which was a surprise to him and everybody else that night, except for me. He deserved that Oscar for Best Actor that year. He has been doing some good stuff since then, and one of those roles is in One Life.

Hopkins plays Nicolas “Nicky” Winton as an older man, and Johnny Flynn plays him as a younger man. He was a businessman in London but went to Czechoslovakia. Where he starts to feel sorry for all the homeless and hungry Jewish children there. He convinces his friends, Trevor Chadwick (Alex Sharp), Betty Maxwell (Martha Keller), and Doreen Warriner (Romola Garai) that they need to help him send the children via train to London before the Nazis invade the country. They would find homes for them in London so they could get them to come. This is easier said than done.

The film splits time between the past and the present as the older Nicolas Winton lives his life but has something that is bothering him. He feels he needs to give his notes and papers from back in the day to a newspaper but doesn’t have any luck. He eventually meets a man played by Jonathan Pryce Martin Blake, who puts him in touch with a BBC television show Modern Times. Once the host sees his notes and papers, she reaches out to some of the Jewish people he saved as children.

The film is important because of the main character and what he does for these helpless children, but the fact that this has such historical relevance is important as well. The Allies made a deal with the Nazis back in 1938 that they could have part of Czechoslovakia called Sudetenland if they didn’t invade the country entirely.  Well, they lied and invaded anyway. It just shows what these people are truly about and why this man’s mission is such a vital fight for survival at that time.  Any movie that deals with this type of story is important, and as such, so is this one.

Besides the actors who play the main characters and their friends, there are a couple of other actresses who are important to the story. One is Helena Bonham Carter, who plays Babi. She is a woman who helps the younger Nicolas Winton find financing and homes for the poor homeless and hungry children. The other is Lena Olin, who plays the older Nicolas Winton’s wife. She is very helpful to him as he’s an elderly man who needs constant care. She is very supportive of his mission at the end of his life, which ended up getting him some notoriety for the humanitarian work he did before WWII started.

The director James Hawes, with writers Lucinda Coxen and Nick Drake, has crafted an engaging story that I was quite fascinated by. The story was very good because it was a period piece and a modern story of a hero. Both sides of this man’s story are engaging. The actors in the past sequences were very good in their roles, and obviously,  even at his advanced age, Hopkins is once again great. I’m always interested in films about WWII, but this was a story that I was completely enamored by. It is a heartwarming story of someone who cared about others besides himself. That to me will always make a good movie.

One Life is a movie that has multiple actors playing the same character, but both sides of this man’s story work perfectly. The cast in the past was good, including Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Flynn, and Hopkins and Olin are as good as the older characters. The writing and direction were both  very good as well. This is another story of WWII that will make people mad at the Nazis but also happy that there was a happy ending to this man’s life. All the stories about this terrible war didn’t turn out to have terrible endings, and that’s a good thing. This movie is a good thing as well.

3 ½ stars

Dan Skip Allen