Worth: $18.00
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Cast:
Anthony Hopkins, Johnny Flynn, Lena Olin, Romola Garai, Alex Sharp, Marthe Keller, Jonathan Pryce, Helena Bonham Carter
Intro:
... will bring tears to your eyes.
Any new film starring/featuring Sir Anthony Hopkins is immediately ‘on the radar’. He is one of those actors that just seems to get better all the time and, given his amazing performances over so many years, that is quite a feat. But it is good to remember that he is also a collaborative actor. He works so well with other players, and he always modulates his performance to help the whole project rather than dominate it. Though he doesn’t spend much time spruiking his talents, he is on the record as saying that he likes to work with good actors and this well-crafted film is no exception. Stalwarts Johnathan Pryce and Helena Bonham Carter, for example, add depth and colour to the film.
Hopkins plays Nicholas Winton, a man who had a remarkable life and who made a big difference to others. Jewish culture has a blessing – “may you live a long life” – and that was deservedly true of Winton who lived to 104. The film isn’t really a biopic though, so much as a story of everyday heroism and the exceptional qualities that war can bring out in some people. The film asks, how much difference can one life make? And the answer is, a lot if there is a will to do so.
We open with Nicholas and his wife Grete (the wonderful Lena Olin). He could be paddling about in his cardigan and slippers, but he still has that restlessness and desire to ‘do something’ that motivated him as a young man. Sometimes, Grete wishes he would just sit back and relax and enjoy his family. With another grandchild on the way, she is keen to make their nice home in the stockbroker belt a bit tidier. Nicholas’ charity work has required a lot of posting things out and, as a sort of half-diagnosed hoarder, he has a study stuffed full of files and papers stretching back decades. Those papers are not just any old paper though, as they tell the story of the extraordinary things Nicholas did as a young man during the Second World War. As Hitler was moving into Sudetenland (and then, inevitably, Czechoslovakia), Nicholas becomes aware that so many children will be in peril. As a Jew himself, he is especially concerned for the plight of young Jewish children, given the Nazis’ murderous antisemitism.
The film moves back and forth between the present day and the war years. In the 1930s, the younger Nicholas (energetically played by Johnny Flynn) insists on going to Czechoslovakia himself to organise the evacuation of as many children as he can. Although the window is closing, for a while the Nazis accept that, if the children have the correct papers, they can be put on a train to England. If they don’t have those papers, they will end up on a very different train. Ironically, it is his love of documentation and bureaucracy that provides the loophole for the whole enterprise.
The well-created war time scenes are a mixture of bureaucracy and tension. Parts of this feel like a spy film or a thriller. The plaited narrative of the older Nicholas’ life is both gentler and more wistful. Towards the end comes the recognition of the significance of what he achieved. At this point, director James Hawes does not shy away from the full human significance of what Nicholas and his friends did. The scenes showing the bottomless gratitude of the survivors will bring tears to your eyes. Still, the problem of inhumanity and the suffering of children in war is sadly ever-present of course, and horrible contemporary echoes haunt us as we leave the cinema.
