THE UNSUNG SCHINDLER
Hugely moving story of how Esther Rantzen rediscovered...
One Life Cert: 12A 1hr 50mins ★★★★★
Priscilla Cert: 15A 1hr 53mins ★★★★★
The Boy And The Heron C ert: 12A 2hrs 4mins ★★★★★
I‘Powerful story with an obvious and tragic contemporary resonance’
f we’re honest, most of us only know of Oskar Schindler because the great Steven Spielberg made an unforgettable film about him. It’s an indication of the challenge facing the makers of One Life that most of us only know about Nicholas Winton because Esther Rantzen dedicated a big chunk of a 1988 episode of her normally comic consumer programme That’s
Life! to him.
Somewhat against the odds, it turned out to be a hugely moving moment of television that’s now been faithfully recreated to form part of an equally moving film.
The drama plays out, very effectively, in two separate timelines. In the first, set in the late 1980s, we watch as the older Winton, quietly played by Anthony Hopkins, sifts through a lifetime of paperwork and clutter. There are old black and white photographs, typed lists, a leather briefcase… already we have a fair idea of where we are heading.
And then suddenly it’s 1938 and Winton is a young London stockbroker living in some style with his formidable mother (beautifully played by Helena Bonham Carter) but determined to do something to help the growing plight of mainly Jewish refugees fleeing from Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland.
He travels to Prague, initially for a week, stays for three and eventually sets in motion a mass evacuation that will in time bring almost 700 children to safety in the UK.
It’s a powerful story with an obvious and tragic contemporary resonance that’s never oversold by director James Hawes, has welcome flashes of humour and is helped considerably by two standout performances, from Johnny Flynn as the younger Winton and Romola Garai as his brave, straight-talking colleague, Doreen Warriner.
With the exception of the totally brilliant Lost In Translation, I’ve never really got on with the films of Sofia Coppola and this modest continues with Priscilla, a biopic of Priscilla Presley that confines itself to the formative years she spent being first pursued by and then married to Elvis. Which sadly means there is no mention of her magnificent contribution to The Naked Gun trilogy. Shame.
Instead we watch uncomfortably as Elvis meets her at a US airbase in West Germany when she was only 14 and courts her with a vigour that may have been chaste (Presley serves as a producer on the film so one could query the film’s objectivity) but would surely be unacceptable these days.
Elvis’s erratic behaviour (he wouldn’t have sex with her but happily fed her sleeping pills) and his need to control (he demanded she change her hair colour and eye make-up) are presumably the whole point of Coppola’s film. But the drama feels flat and episodic, I never warmed to either Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla or Jacob Elordi as Elvis and found the exaggerated height difference between them more annoying than clever.
The Boy And The Heron is the latest film from that master of Japanese animation, Hayao Miyazaki, director of such treats as Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle and co-founder of the world-renowned Studio Ghibli.
Given that the 82-year-old Miyazaki came out of retirement specially to make it, it arrives garlanded with the highest expectations. But, unless you’re a serious animation buff or a real Ghibli fan, it doesn’t quite live up to them.
The story of a young boy who is moved to the country after his mother is apparently killed in a wartime hospital fire takes an age to get going and is quite a tangle even before a squawking, talking and really rather unpleasant heron flaps into view.
It’s a multi-layered fantastical tale that leads to some dark places but the images and animation are fascinating and an English language voice-cast led by Christian Bale, Robert Pattinson and Florence Pugh pour heart, soul and heron into what remain, at times, rather confused proceedings.