From the start, this bore all the dreaded hallmarks of a routine TV movie: stale dialogue, laboured narrative, undeveloped characters. It was docu without the drama. No attempt to explore or present the trauma of separation and forced exile. All too clean, too tidy, too predictable, too focussed on the facts. I liked Hopkins, though remember him mostly as simply pottering around, mulling silently about the past. Things lifted in the final That's Life section, but in the end, I was left with the taste of cloying sentimentality and self-congratulation. I get it that the film was a tribute, and rightly, and deservedly so, in honouring this great man- but as a film, only a poor man's Schindler's, at best.
Review of One Life
