Quentin Tarantino wasn’t the only acclaimed American filmmaker to release his tenth movie in 2019. An older, more meticulous, equally divisive (though for very different reasons) American auteur had his film premiere at Cannes just a couple days before Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in fact.
A Hidden Life is the latest feature from Terrence Malick, his sixth in ten years, something that would’ve seemed unthinkable to fans of his work decades ago when he was notorious for taking his time between movies (his second and third films famously came twenty years apart). But with that increased frequency came less acclaim, with the trio of films produced after The Tree of Life the least popular of his movies by far. To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song were experimental art pieces produced without a script, little plot to speak of and even more gratuitous tonal pretensions than most of his prior work. A Hidden Life however, his first semi-conventional narrative film since The New World, is not like those; it’s less stream of conscious oriented, less frustratingly opaque, modestly accessible in its intents and themes, and follows characters you can actually invest in while still retaining the filmmakers’ signature lyrical style.
All the usual characteristics of that style are here: a long winded pace with stretches of silence, poetic musings in voiceover, a preference for close-ups and low camera angles, hypnotically fluid camera movement, cuts based more around themes and allusions than narrative and strung together as evocative vignettes, and utterly spellbinding shots of nature Malick likely waited days or weeks to capture. Even in the casting, his particular pattern persists. Just as the likes of Val Kilmer, Brian Dennehy, Imogen Poots, Nick Offerman, Antonio Banderas, Holly Hunter, Iggy Pop, and Dan Harmon (to name just a few) showed up in minor parts in his last few movies, Matthias Schoenaerts makes a random appearance here; so does Jürgen Prochnow. This was the final movie for both Bruno Ganz and Michael Nyqvist, who cameo as a judge and a bishop respectively, and Tarantino’s Hitler, Martin Wuttke is in the movie as well, one of several Inglorious Basterds veterans (lead actor August Diehl among them) to once more return to the Third Reich.
Typical though these staples may be, here they are transfixing; enhancing the mood of the piece and not distracting for their excessiveness from the more important aims of the film. It also helps that they are applied with such skill and beauty. Cinematographer Jörg Widmer (and if we’re being honest, Malick himself) shoots every setting with an exquisite grace, the farming village where much of the film takes place rendered a sequestered Eden, idealized before the rise of the Nazi regime and the Second World War. The stunning natural imagery is matched by marvelous interior compositions framed like paintings; and as heavy in symbolism as the more foreboding elements are (literal storm clouds hanging over conversations for example), they are nonetheless breathtaking. Underscoring all of it is beautiful, elegiac music from James Newton Howard, heralding the poignancy and ultimate bittersweet tragedy of the storys’ end.
The unambiguousness is appropriate though given what the movie is doing. A Hidden Life is about standing up to evil, about patriotism vs. rightfulness, and about making sense of a society trying to justify atrocities. Above all though, it’s a film about conscience, as it follows the real story of Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter, withstanding immense pressure to conform to Nazism and its’ poisoning of his tight-knit community. Diehl plays the part with a winsome stillness, conveying impressive range even with a single expression. It’s needed, given how much of his dialogue is delivered in that aforementioned voiceover: letters to his wife (a marvellous Valerie Pachner) or thoughtful meditations on the nature of his choices and views of the world around him typical of Malick’s approach to mood and character. But this is a closed-off character anyway, whose feelings have to be hidden given fascist intolerance of dissent, and so this Malick trademark serves a real story purpose for a change. Franz has a strong moral compass that needs to be emphasized. His devout Catholicism plays into this, the film drawing attention to his apprehension and disgust at church doctrine being used to support Nazi ideology, which he identifies fairly early on as inherently evil from a Biblical point of view. It’s also implicitly what keeps him unafraid of being a martyr (which he was officially beatified as after the war). But of course he doesn’t have to be.
Two things are accentuated frequently throughout the film in Franz’s meetings with Nazis and Nazi sympathizers: how easy it would be to swear loyalty to Hitler (also how likely it would be his conscription would land him merely an office job), and how his resistance is not going to make any difference in the grander scheme of things; that he’s sacrificing so much for nothing. And yet it isn’t nothing. That is the point Malick is making, that goodness for its’ own sake is noble; that even if it won’t change the world, standing up for what’s right in the face of what is so obviously, heinously wrong, is valuable. That small acts by insignificant people are meaningful, if not in an immediate sense, than in a greater transcendental sense.
The Tree of Life famously opened with a quote from the Book of Job. A Hidden Life ends with one from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, where the movies’ title derives: “…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” That passage is the driving force behind the film, the source of its ideology and character study. Malick is arguing that Franz was such a person, whose good deeds, peaceful life, and resistance to fascism in spite of any wider impact otherwise amounted to some good in the world. Of course the great irony is that due to his beatification the real Jägerstätter does not “rest in unvisited tombs”, and has achieved modest immortality in death. But Malick clearly believes that idea still stands. And I think I do too, as I imagine will most who walk away from this movie in understanding of its virtues, and how they matter in our modern world. As grim as things seemed, Franz was not alone in his defiance after all.
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