A Hidden Life: Terrence Malick ponders the essence of taking a moral stand, then and now
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A-minus
Terrence Malick’s latest, A Hidden Life, is one of the year’s most ambitious films and an arguable masterpiece, though, admittedly, your receptivity to it depends on your capacity to experience three solemn hours of waving fields of wheat, theology and Nazi cruelty.
That’s glib, which is something that the beautiful and exasperating A Hidden Life, is definitely not. This is a film grounded in not-so-distant history, based on the real-life story and letters of Franz Jägerstätter, a Catholic conscientious objector who was executed in 1943 at the age of 36 for his refusal to swear an oath to Hitler.
August Diehl plays an Austrian farmer, who puts his family and pastoral life at risk defying the Nazis
A married farmer who lived in an alpine Austrian village, Jägerstätter was conscripted for the beginning of the war in France and subsequently chose not to fight or swear allegiance to Hitler. The farmer is played in the film by August Diehl, whose blond hair and cheekbones suggest an Aryan poster boy, but his instincts are instinctively pacifistic and loving. He’s a walking illustration of St. Therese of Avila’s quote that “the closer one approaches to God, the simpler one becomes.” Contemplating the options, he makes a simple decision: “We have to stand up to evil.”
While Franz is an almost allegorically pure figure, the film is an immediate and exalted experience. Often shooting from waist-height, cinematographer Jörg Widmer views the characters with intimate reverence. We are also immersed in sound -- of water and wind, as well as the uplifting strains of Bach, Handel and Beethoven. In contrast, archival footage of Hitler, both riding in a night motorcade and, in colour, clowning for the camera at the Nazi retreat known as Eagle’s Nest, are there for the brute historical facts.
Once Franz is arrested, taken to a local jail and then transferred to Berlin, the film goes into something of a slow-moving whirlpool of repetitions and descending momentum. The town’s racist mayor insists that Franz get in line. Officers and judges scream at Franz, clergymen and lawyers make arguments about the impracticality of his ideals and the danger to his family. Franz, humiliated and tormented in a Berlin prison, writes heartfelt letters home, read and answered by Fanziska,or “Fani”, (Valerie Pachner) in golden scenes of farm life in the Austrian idyll.
The drama revolves around a classic ethical schism, the ethics of the individual moral code versus the “utilitarian” or consequential ethics that focus on the greatest collective good. Each position, taken to an extreme, can lead to intolerable results: The scrupulously honest person might expose an innocent person to his murderer. The advocate of the common good could justify killing one person to harvest their organs to allow five others to survive. Malick’s film is about the struggle to rationalize the case for the personal morality even when it appears pointless.
A host of practical tempters challenge him: The town’s Nazi-supporting mayor, a priest, a bishop, a lawyer – all argue that Franz is showing short-sighted pride. Nothing he can do will influence the Nazi leadership or the course of the war, but his continued behavior will certainly lead to his execution and the ostracism and suffering of his family.
Their arguments are plausible: As one clergyman, argues, it’s all a question of judgement: God knows what’s in your heart – it doesn’t matter what your mouth says.
There have been famous movies of religious martyrs before (Joan of Arc, Thomas Becket), of characters involved in spiritual cost-risk analysis: temporary pain and eternal life, vs immediate relief and eternal damnation. In contrast, Franz’s inspiration here is not the example of Christ suffering on the cross, but the comforting memory of being in the fields with his wife and three daughters, and the fecundity of the crops and livestock, as evidence of Divine love.
Theologically, this is about immanence, the doctrine that the divine is manifested in the material world. But it’s also consistent with a streak of airy nature-worship in Malick’s films, going back to Days of Heaven, which reached a kitschy nadir in the compassionate dinosaur episode in The Tree of Life. There are fair criticisms here that Franz’s struggle is presented in an abstract, over-esthetic fashion: Malick’s script, drawn from Jägerstätter’s letters, doesn’t tell us much about Jägerstätter’s passionate Catholicism, offers little historical and political context and never specifically mentions the persecution of Jews.
At the same time, Malick’s film isn’t exactly about counting angels on a pin-head: It’s also bluntly challenging to our own time in a period of resurgent race-based nationalism and demagoguery. How do people who believe themselves to be good justify their support of cruel and violent leaders? How do people find the courage to fight back? On the subject of “hidden lives,” one thinks of someone like Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal who was murdered protesting the 2017 Unite The Right rally, in Virginia - an event she felt “compelled” to protest against despite her fears of violence.
A Hidden Life’s title comes from George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch, in a passage that says “the growing good in the world” is dependent on “the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
Malick provides another helpful quote from Soren Kierkegaard in his introduction to his screenplay to A Hidden Life: “The tyrant dies and his rule is over. The martyr dies and his rule begins.” The philosophical argument here is that those who live by their conscience also serve the collective good, by example. In artistic, and political terms, it’s about a commitment to the long game, the one that Terence Malick continues to play.
A Hidden Life. Written and directed by Terrence Malick. Starring: August Diehl and Valerie Pachner.A Hidden Life can be seen at the Cineplex Varsity.