Anthony Hopkins, currently enjoying a late-career purple patch, could bring humanity to a serial killer. Indeed, he’s already vaguely accomplished this, with his Oscar-winning role as Hannibal Lecter, yet his recent performances, crowned by another Oscar for The Father [+lee también:
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It doesn’t get more virtuous than portraying the British-Jewish humanitarian Sir Nicholas Winton, who, as World War II was breaking out, quietly saved hundreds of Jewish children by setting up a branch of the Kindertransport in then-unoccupied Prague, only to live unrecognised for the remainder of his adult life until the BBC light-entertainment show That’s Life devoted a segment to him in 1987. One Life, a new biopic on Winton – which is showing as a BFI London Film Festival gala, after bowing to acclaim at Toronto – adroitly captures this story, and the passage of his quiet but determined life in these two timespans, yet as a piece of cinema and a richer confrontation with history, it leaves more to be desired.

Directed by James Hawes – one of those old-school British pros as comfortable with Black Mirror and Doctor Who as he is with wig- and old typewriter-laden films like this – adeptly ticks the boxes: we get a precis of Winton’s highly admirable achievements, the motivational substance behind them (if definitely not the psychology), and present-day sequences that don’t feel any more evocative than the on-screen text that typically concludes weighty historical dramas. A stockbroker from an assimilated Jewish family (who emigrated to the UK in the late 19th century under the name Wertheim), he’s alerted to the brewing catastrophe in Europe by a close friend who’s already joined the resistance efforts, and carefully identifies a specific area where he can assist. Feeling solidarity deriving from his own second-generation immigrant background, he sees that the German-Jewish families populating refugee camps after Hitler’s invasion of the Sudetenland can be temporarily relieved of their children, whom he plans to match with British foster parents until the cessation of the war (which, of course, wasn’t officially declared yet). Winton and his colleagues were able to save 669 children, who were transported across German and occupied territories with British visas, tragically culminating when Czechoslovakia fell completely to the Nazis.

Interspersed with these flashbacks is a late 1980s-set framing story, marked by Hopkins as Winton pottering about his Maidenhead home as he nears retirement, with his granddaughter’s imminent birth reawakening memories of the youngsters he was equally responsible for giving life to. The sense of historical amnesia is palpable, as he commandeers what remains of his greying old war network to get his records into the hands of the right journalists, who engineer a big, sentimental “TV moment” on That’s Life, where the now-middle-aged children reunite with their unknown guardian under the studio lights.

In this age of upheaval and global population displacement, Hawes and screenwriter Lucinda Coxon seem to be asking, “Where is similar decency?” The current British Home Secretary wants to ship desperate migrants to Rwanda; Winton’s dealings with similar government departments prior to the war speak of a lost moral clarity. Yet this is a sentimental film that can’t fully articulate the tragic sweep of history, preferring to subsist on more innocent hope. Interested viewers should seek out or reread WG Sebald’s Kindertransport legacy tale Austerlitz, a more convincing meditation on all of this film’s themes.

One Life is a UK production, staged by See-Saw Films, MBK Productions and BBC Films. Its world sales are overseen by FilmNation Entertainment and Cross City Films.