One Life: Anthony Hopkins, indisputable great, gets one more chance to show us what he can do

This moving if by-the-book true-life saga has taken an unusual route to the big screen. It seems unlikely One Life would exist without a 1988 segment on the BBC magazine show That’s Life, much viewed on YouTube, that invited Nicholas Winton an elderly London stockbroker, to discuss his rescuing of 669 endangered, mostly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia before the Nazi invasion. It transpired that, unknown to Winton, the audience was packed with grown survivors. One by one, they stood and thanked their benefactor.

James Hawes’s drama, coproduced by BBC Films, approaches that incident with caution. We get Samantha Spiro as a version of Esther Rantzen. We hear Winton, played by a predictably untouchable Anthony Hopkins, earlier watching the show (famous for dogs saying “sausages”) without much enthusiasm. But it doesn’t deny the emotional kick of the segment. Without it, Winton, who died in 2015 at 106, might have remained in suburban obscurity.

One Life divides itself between Winton’s time in retirement and his experiences organising escape for refugees in prewar Prague. The earlier sections are handled with a clean efficiency that (understandably enough, given the building horror) holds back from any effort at realism. The handsome Johnny Flynn plays the younger Winton as an initially befuddled, self-described socialist who, after realising the dilemma, brings considerable organisational skills to bear on scissoring away yards of red tape. Romola Garai does good no-nonsense as the equally assiduous Doreen Warriner. Helena Bonham Carter continues to have a good middle-age – who is now better at playing indomitable posh ladies? – as Winton’s supportive mother. “Hampstead!” she snaps when a foreign-office official, noticing her German accent, wonders where she’s travelled from.

It is all shot in a too-tasteful light that falls on theatrically muddied children, but audiences are intelligent enough to fill in the gaps. We are again reminded of how so many in Europe realised the clock was ticking to catastrophe in the last days of the 1930s. It is an exciting tale, even if we know the conclusion.

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One Day is, however, at its best in the later sequences. Few actors have continued to deliver such good work so deep into their ninth decade. Eighty-six on New Year’s Eve, Hopkins is still a master of introverted distraction – the midsentence pause as he appears to spot something fascinating on the tip of his shoe. He is currently playing a robot in Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon. He is about to play the eponymous psychoanalyst in Freud’s Last Session. Here he gets to anatomise a very English class of uncomplicated decency. As we begin, the former City of London man is counting the change from charity collection boxes as news emerges of the 1987 stock-market crash. “Deregulation!” he mutters disapprovingly.

The story finds Winton cleaning up a disordered office and wondering what to do with a scrapbook containing details of the evacuation. After a conference with Robert Maxwell’s grand widow – the soon-to-be-disgraced Mirror owner was himself a Czech emigre – the documents end up with That’s Life, and his belated fame is assured. What sets the film apart from movie-of-the-week true stories are Winton’s efforts to process the long-suppressed traumas of those months in Prague. Who was left behind? How much more could be done? There is little of this in the script, but Hopkins conveys it all in his lowered gaze and his stuttered hesitancy. Lena Olin is touching as his supportive wife. Jonathan Pryce has a decent role as one of the few surviving colleagues from the rescue.

One Life breaks no new cinematic ground. But it tells a story worth hearing. And it allows an indisputable great one more chance to show us what he can do.

One Life is in cinemas from New Year’s Day