A Hidden Life (2019)
dir. Terrence Malick
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2019 Fox Searchlight Pictures
The contemplative, roving camera of Terrence Malick has been loosed upon the breathtaking beauty of Europe. But the grandeur of the sweeping vistas, open fields, and European architecture comes at a price. Malick’s film A Hidden Life begins in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II and ends in 1943, well before the horrors of that conflict ended. We see little of the war’s devastation, though, because A Hidden Life focuses on historical figure Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian man who refused to fight in Hitler’s army. The picture is a meditation on the price of resistance, for both Franz and those closest to him. It also wrestles with religion and draws parallels between the fervor of the German and Austrian people for Hitler’s cause and America’s current political climate. A Hidden Life does all this in Malick’s inimitable, transcendent elliptical style.
Malick opens his movie with footage from another movie: Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. In an ironic counterpoint, we see Franz a few scenes later playing a game with his wife, Franziska (Fani), and their three young daughters. Akin to a dry-land version of Marco Polo, Franz is blindfolded. He tries to catch the others, but has only their intermittent banging of pots (and their giggles) to decipher their location. It’s a potent visual metaphor – which avoids being too on-the-nose – for Europe being blind to the coming atrocities of Hitler’s Germany. It can also be read, simultaneously, as the German people groping in the dark for leadership of any kind following their economic devastation following the repercussions of World War I.
An understanding of that historical context leads me to one of the two main – if fairly minor – problems I had with A Hidden Life. The first third of the film establishes the Jägerstätter family as living in an unspoiled idyll. Their perfect agrarian lifestyle, in which they are vital members in a small, tightknit community, belies the horrors and complicated legacy of World War I. It ignores the messiness of Europe before Hitler plunged the continent back into darkness. But, considering Malick’s preoccupation with the biblical Fall of Man narrative – aspects of both his films Days of Heaven and The Tree of Life are ruminations on that story – it’s not surprising that he structured A Hidden Life the way he did.
The second issue I had with the film comes in the middle third. At this point, Franz has been jailed and is awaiting trial for his refusal to fight for Hitler. The village folk, led by their mayor, who is essentially a stand-in for Hitler himself, turn on Fani, treating her with contempt because they consider her husband a traitor. Again and again we are shown their slights toward Fani and her daughters. At almost three hours in length, Malick and his editors could easily have trimmed some of this material out while preserving the full impact that the townsfolk’s ostracizing has on the Jägerstätter family.
The most effective of these sequences comes when we hear Franz and Fani read their letters to one another in voice-over. We hear the undying love they have for each other as we see the injustices they suffer: Franz in prison, where he is beaten by guards, and Fani at the hands of the community as she tries to harvest the crops with them. And still, we see that some people are capable of acts of kindness among cruelty. At one point, the local flour mill operator gives Fani more flour than the wheat she gave him should have produced.
The sequences with the mayor of the village, in which he gives drawn out, fiery speeches castigating those lower races whom Hitler will purge from the land, give the impression that Malick is also wrestling with our current political situation. It’s so easy to draw a direct line from the hatred spewed by the Nazi ideology to the demagoguery and race-baiting of the Trump administration. One line in the film, “Don’t they know evil when they see it?,” could be aimed directly at Malick’s American audience.
Malick is a believer in the beauty and harmony of nature, and A Hidden Life puts his love for it on radiant display. Cinematographer Jörg Widmer’s stunningly gorgeous photography of the mountains, forests, and open fields of the film’s setting – shooting took place in the far north of Italy, along the Italian/Austrian border – is alone worth the journey. Widmer, who worked with Malick as a camera operator on his film The Tree of Life, among others, provides visuals that dovetail seamlessly with the ruminative tone poem quality of Malick’s aesthetic.
The director’s work with actors is similarly mesmerizing. In any given scene, you get the feeling that Malick encouraged his actors to dig and dig until they were able to find emotional truth. It’s easy to imagine many minutes on either side of the footage we actually get to see. The result is a spellbinding experience.
The principles we live by – especially when it’s a challenge – is the main theme of A Hidden Life. Franz takes a principled stand against what he finds morally indefensible, even at the ultimate cost and when a simple signature could set him free. He does so even when members of the clergy urge him to go along to get along.
Several times throughout the movie, Franz is reminded that one single person’s resistance means nothing in the face of history. He and his actions will be forgotten, he is assured by his captors. Why not just renounce his beliefs and swear allegiance to Hitler? Franz’s actions might not have stopped the war, but his most powerful act was to set an example. If more people had done so, that could have led to a transformational shift that stopped hate, death, and destruction in its tracks. The best lesson A Hidden Life imparts is that we always have the opportunity to be a part of that kind of transformation.
Why it got 4 stars:
- A Hidden Life is right up there with Days of Heaven and The Tree of Life, which is among Malick’s best work. The story is compelling and emotional, and Malick’s singular elliptical style is as captivating here as it’s ever been. Despite the depressing subject matter, A Hidden Life is among the most beautifully photographed films of 2019.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Just as in Days of Heaven, Terrence Malick takes great pleasure with this film in shooting the process of farming and agriculture.
- I spent most of my review talking about the devastating beauty of the nature shots in the movie, but Malick’s camera also roves around some stunning European architecture that is just as gorgeously shot.
- There is a brief sequence where a prison guard beats Franz and it becomes a first-person perspective; the guard is essentially hitting and looking directly at the camera. I’ve never seen anything like that in a Terrence Malick film (although, admittedly, this is only the fourth one I’ve seen of his ten films).
- “It is better to suffer injustice than to do it.” I wonder how many of us would subscribe to that statement if the injustice was actually happening to us. My bet is not many.
- I’m fairly certain there is a visual nod to the fantastic Robert Bresson film A Man Escaped, another WWII film based on a real-life prisoner of the Nazis. There is a scene in both films where the prisoners form a line to dump out the waste buckets from their cells. It’s too similar not to be an homage.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Viewed on a screener disc in my glorious, darkened home theater. Cooper (our dog) never made a peep. That probably had something to do with the fact that I watched the movie with my Bluetooth headphones on, so he couldn’t hear the various animals on screen (I think sound is usually what sets him off). What I lost by not seeing this movie on the big screen, I made up for by having the dialog, music (which is also very moving), and sound effects right up close to me. It was an incredible experience.