Just before the holiday, I had the privilege of seeing "A Hidden Life," Terrence Malick's tenth feature film. Regular readers know I am a huge Malick fan, as evidenced by the presence of several of his films in my All-Time Favorite Films list to the right.
The first thing one notices with this most recent film is his return to a more structured story. I believe his last three projects, "To The Wonder," "Knight of Cups," and "Song To Song" are a trilogy about being lost in a life without meaning in the 21st century. We were witness to a kind of confusion, ennui, and an inability to commit oneself to anything or anyone, including oneself. Malick's approach to this subject matter was even more loose, Impressionistic, and improvisational than he has been in the past and the results were criticized for lacking a clear plot. I have a high tolerance for soft narratives and while it is true that the films show a lot of characters simply wandering around certain locations either staring at each other or off in the distance, I felt the films were a perfect product of what Malick was trying to say and portray.
But with "A Hidden Life," Malick told an audience at a rare Q&A in 2016 that he has "repented and gone back to working with a much tighter script" but went on to qualify that with the idea that "it actually makes it easier to improvise when you have rails underneath you."
Based on the life story of Franz Jägerstätter (played with great presence by August Diehl), much of the action takes place in the little Austrian village of St. Radegund where Jägerstätter and his wife (masterfully played by Valerie Pachner), like most villagers, tend a farm. Theirs is a simple way of life. Of course Malick is a master of the landscape shot (swoon over most every scene in "The New World" and cry with nostalgia at the lovely hometown shots in "Tree of Life") and there are absolutely breathtaking images of Austrian peaks and high-altitude meadows, but what struck me immediately was the backbreaking, merciless, unending work daily life must have been for these people. Seeing them use little hand held scythes to cut down grass as my attention pulled out to reveal an entire mountainside made me ache just watching it.
But this is 1939 and the Nazis have conscripted him to serve in the military. Yet even though they are isolated in a mountain village in Austria, he and his family know exactly what is going on in Germany and the rest of the world, and he knows that what the Reich is, is wrong. He refuses to swear an oath to Hitler and he is taken into custody for a trial. Jailed and beaten, the Nazis eventually kill him. And all the while his jailers, the village mayor, the clergy tell him to simply take the oath and swear loyalty to Hitler because there is no harm in it, he can say the words and not mean them. But Jägerstätter understands the existential dilemma as well as the very real danger of trying to walk such a line. There were thousands who did just that and while they may have saved their lives and the lives of their families, they enabled millions of people to lose theirs. And they have to--or had to--live with that knowledge, that they enabled absolute evil. Principles, morality, and ethics are not concepts that can be chosen or followed only when convenient. But having said that, I am not sure what I myself would have done. Perhaps I would have sworn the oath and then worked with the Resistance. His is a bravery I am not sure I--or many of us--possess.
In fact, the film's title refers to something else Jägerstätter was told, over and over: that one person, one single act, a hidden life out of the view of the world, cannot make a difference. But this film and the story of the real life Jägerstätter proves that it can. (The story of Jägerstätter's life did not come to the attention of the general public until the 1960s...and in 2007, he was declared a martyr and beatified by the Catholic Church. The same church that actually aided and conspired with the Nazis...I'm just saying. Read about his life here.)
Even though there is a tighter script, and a clear narrative with a beginning and end, this is still a beautiful, glorious Malick film with all that entails. The heart and mind are still given equal, albeit dream-like, screen time. The aforementioned concepts of principles, morality, and ethics along with philosophical and spiritual ideas are held aloft in the stunningly beautiful and pristine Austrian mountains. Like I said, Malick really knows how to choose and lens phenomenal landscapes. And even when he is shooting interior scenes, he still composes and shoots them (with wide angle lenses) like landscapes. Look at the scenes in the Bishop's office and the church in "A Hidden Life" and marvel at how a desk and stacks of books can look like the mountain landscape outside. It is a gorgeous and subtle motif.
Recommend? Yes. Beautiful for the eyes but also for the heart and mind. And it is no accident that a film portraying a man refusing to swear loyalty to a sick, egomaniacal Fascist was made and released in this current political climate.
http://www.foxsearchlight.com/ahiddenlife/
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