“A HIDDEN LIFE”: Crisis of conscience

Published December 19, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene

My rating: B+ (Opens Dec. 20 at the Glenwood Arts)

173 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Spirituality is not something the movies do particularly well.  After all, it’s a visual medium; the inner workings of the heart are not easily captured by the camera.

Leave it to Terrence Malick, the most idiosyncratic American filmmaker ever, to find a way to put a human soul on the movie screen.

In “A Hidden Life” Malick explores the true story of Franz Jaggerstatter, an Austrian farmer who at the height of World War II decided he could not take an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler and so spent the rest of his days in a series of grim Nazi prisons.

Jaggerstatter’s story is, unlike most recent Malick films (the magnificent “Tree of Life” and the irritating “To the Wonder”) a fairly linear one.  But the Texas-based auteur brings to the table his trademark eye-of-God perspective, so that while “A Hidden Life” unfolds in more or less chronological order, it’s filled with visual and aural digressions.

The results are heartbreaking, moving and inspiring.

Malick opens his film with footage of Adolf Hitler from Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda documentary “Triumph of the Will.”

We then meet Franz (sublimely underplayed by August Diehl) and his wife Fani (Valerie Pachner) swinging scythes in a blindingly green field overseen by rugged alpine crags.  A towering church steeple is always in the background, a reminder not only that Franz is a volunteer sexton (he’s the village bell ringer) but that he takes his religion very seriously.

In a series of interlocking scenes, some only seconds long and dealt like cards from a Tarot deck, we get a sense of life in this tyrolean paradise, Franz and Fani’s courtship, and the life they have built together on a drop-dead beautiful mountainside with three daughters.

It’s a world centered on home, family, farm and village. And it’s almost too beautiful and peaceful for words.

But there are intimations of things going on in the larger world. Fani freezes as an unseen plane passes overhead. Franz has furtive conversations with fellow villagers who share his anti-Nazi sentiments. The mayor (Karl Markovics) when in his cups lets fly with rants about inferior races.

Franz takes his concerns to the local priest (Tobias Moratti), who is sympathetic but advises him to shut up and do what’s asked of him: “You’ll almost surely be shot. Your sacrifice will benefit no one.”

Not even a session with the area bishop (Michael Nyqvist) provides a satisfactory answer to Franz’ heartfelt query: “If our leaders are not good, if they’re evil, what does one do?”

August Diehl

 

The first half of this nearly three-hour intimate epic centers on civilian life…but Franz and Fani know the day will come when he’s expected to report for duty. The tinkling of the postman’s bicycle bell becomes a nerve-wracking omen. One of these days he’ll be bringing an induction notice.

The second half follows Franz through various prisons, abuse at the hands of thuggish guards and endless legal wrangling. Here’s the thing about the Nazis…they may be determined to kill Franz for his beliefs, but by God they’re going to follow the proscribed process.

The film is a culmination of the Malick style — we don’t get conversations so much as impressionist snippets of dialogue and/or interior monologues. (By the way the important dialogue is in English while the “background” talk is in German; curiously, this is not at all distracting.) And in the transcendent world Malick offers us humans, animals, clouds, even a weathered wooden plank all seem equally important — essential parts of a greater creation.

Dramatically the film “A Hidden Life” most closely resembles  is Carl Dreyer’s silent classic “The Passion of Joan of Arc.” In that landmark (one of my finalists for the greatest movie ever made) we find Joan on trial and undergoing endless examinations by clerics and lawyers, who use everything from logic to instruments of torture to get her to change her story about talking to God. She can save herself if she’ll just deny what she believes to be true.

It’s the same with Franz Jaggerstatter. Priests,  his attorneys, even one of the judges overseeing his case (the late Bruno Ganz)… all seem to admire the man’s faith and courage, all try to find ways to twist the system to save him.  If he’ll just make a confession of loyalty to Der Furhrer, he can be posted to an army hospital.  It’s not like he has to kill anybody.

Quietly heartbreaking and matter-of-factly subversive (how many of us today have what it takes to stand up to evil?), “A Hidden Life” submerses us in one man’s life, death, and personal triumph.

It’s the movie we need right now.

| Robert W. Butler

Read the original review and more reviews at Butler’s Cinema Scene