A Hidden Life

A Hidden Life

“A Hidden Life,” by Terrence Malick, is the story of a man who refused to take part in World War II. This film is among his best works and also one of the hardest to watch. It has a running time just short of three hours, moves slowly (if you want to be nice, you could say it “ambles”) and demands more concentration and willingness to entertain philosophical questions and stray observations than most movies made today even bother asking for.

It also feels like as much of a career summing-up as Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” melding styles from throughout Malick’s nearly half century cinema history somehow linking the sickly humor and grounded in place (with beginnings, middles and ends) passages that fans remember from his early masterpieces “Badlands” and “Days of Heaven” with the whirling, fast-cut montages with voiceover approach that he adopted in later years. It’s one of this year’s finest films and most unique experiences at the movies, but likely to be polarizing if not alienating for some viewers as are all of Malick’s films, to one extent or another.

August Diehl stars as Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer who refused to serve in Hitler’s army. He was not a famous man or even particularly outgoing; he did not have great rhetorical flourishes at his disposal with which to defend himself or explain himself or define the limits of what society could demand from its citizens without betraying their humanity. He was just an average person who lived according to his principles until they killed him. In this sense he resembled Bartleby the Scrivener (“I would prefer not to”), albeit a religious edition: A quiet Catholic whose commitment wavered only when it came time for deeds rather than words (“What shall I do?”).

When trucks full of Nazi soldiers rolled down his village’s main street and a soldier yelled “Heil Hitler!” at him Franz did not respond in kind. (The screenwriters call this quietism.) Instead he opted for silence, which spoke volumes. Thus began an ordeal that could only have one end under a fascist dictatorship: Jägerstätter’s story ends like Reinisch’s the Catholic priest who was executed after refusing to swear loyalty to Adolf Hitler because history does not abide resistance from its subjects, especially those who refuse obedience on religious grounds.

The film opens in 1939 with a newsreel-style montage of Hitler tightening his grip on Germany. Franz lives in St Radegund, a small alpine village, with his wife Fani (played by Valerie Pachner) and their three young daughters; they scrape by farming fields, baling hay and tending to livestock. He is called up to fight for the Germans but never sees action; when he is reactivated in 1943 (by which time Fani has given birth to more children and Germany has invaded numerous countries, killed millions of people and embarked on a systematic extermination campaign whose outlines the German nation was either dimly or keenly aware), he decides that his conscience will not allow him to wage war as a combatant. Not just any war, but this one.

And it’s not easy, and Malick’s movie shows us how much it costs him. The effect on his marriage is complicated he seems to have been apolitical until he met Fani, principled and steadfast after marrying her and now she’s in the excruciating position of suggesting that he not act on the same values he is proud to have learned from her, which she is proud to have taught him. If he sticks to his guns, so to speak, he’ll go to jail for a long time; be tortured, possibly killed; deprive her of a husband and their children of a father (and the household of an income); expose the rest of their family to public shunning by villagers who worship Hitler as a god and regard anyone who refuses to idolize him as a heretic deserving imprisonment or death.

This is where a lesser film would milk easy feelings of moral superiority: It’s nice farmer vs. the Nazis, after all, and what person doesn’t want to believe they’d be this brave under these circumstances? But “A Hidden Life” isn’t interested in push-button morality. It uses its story more like a theologian or philosophy professor would use it: as material for questions meant to provoke self-examination among viewers.

Is it morally right for individuals suffering out there somewhere — spouses, children — because one person won’t let go of an idea? Is that really best for the family? For society? For yourself? Can you remain wholly consistent while carrying out noble acts of defiance? Is it sinful to act in self-preservation? Which self-preserving actions are acceptable terms with your own conscience?

We see other people trying to talk Franz into giving up on various occasions, often with some faint sense that his willingness to suffer makes them feel guilty about preferring comfort. When Franz discusses his situation early in the story with the local priest (Tobias Moretti), the cleric subtly warns him that opposing the state is not a good idea and that most religious leaders support Hitler; he seems sincerely concerned about Franz and his family, but there’s also a touch of self-excoriation in his troubled face.

In a long, maddening scene about halfway through the film by which point Franz is in military jail, getting regularly humiliated and beaten up by guards who are trying to break him a lawyer asks Franz if it really matters that he’s not carrying a rifle and wearing a uniform when soldiers need their shoes shined and sandbags filled. Everywhere he turns, Franz finds people who agree with him and say they’re rooting for him but can’t or won’t take that extra step of publicly refusing to bend with the Nazi wind.

The movie’s generosity of spirit is so great that it even allows some of the Nazis to have moments of doubt, although never acted upon in any positive way as when a judge (the late Bruno Ganz, in one of his final roles) invites Franz into his office, questions him about his choices and thinks hard about them, with an upset expression on his face.

After getting up from the chair and exiting the room, Franz is replaced by a judge who sits down and looks at his hands resting on his knees. It seems as if he is trying to imagine what it would be like to be Franz.

That’s “A Hidden Life” for you a movie that puts you inside a situation and treats it as such, rather than turning it into a series of easy prompts for feeling superior to some of history’s most vile people. What matters here is not just what happened but what was felt by the hero and his loved ones while it did; which questions they thought and argued over as time went by.

What makes this story epic (besides its length) is how much attention the writer-director and his cast & crew pay to the mundane milieu around the hero’s decisions. Malick always notes the physical details of existence: scythes rhythmically cutting grass in a field, sunlight passing through trees casting shadows on walls, a sleeping young girl having her legs and feet dangle as her father carries her. Like “Days of Heaven,” one of the great movies about work, it returns again & again behind bars or in the village to ritualized action, letting simple tasks unfold in longer takes without music (and sometimes without cuts), giving us an idea of how personal political struggles get baked into life’s daily bread.

There are so many fleeting moments that break your heart because they’re so recognizable or odd yet somehow undeniably real. The scene where Franz stops at a cafe with two captors while in military custody and straightens an umbrella propped against the doorway on his way out comes to mind. A few shots later there’s one from Franz’s POV in the backseat of a car, with an open window framing one of his escorts doing a weird little dance on the sidewalk something he probably does all day every day whether he’s wearing Nazi drag or civilian clothes.

Franz Rogowski, the lead of “Transit,” has a small but wrenching role as Waldlan, another soldier who becomes a conscientious objector. In no time flat, and always from some odd angle or through a side door, the movie lets you know everything about this man’s character that can be known his profound gentleness (established through Rogowski’s sad eyes & soft voice), his imagination (which leads to a monologue on red wine/ white wine and an act of posing two straw men as if they were lovers necking in a field).

Every minute adds another revelation whose full power is only felt backwards. Not a day has gone by since I first saw it where I haven’t thought about the moment when one prisoner looks at another next to him, points to the clipboard/ paper/ pen he’s been given for last words and asks “What do I write?”

The movie also understands that regular citizens will side with government bullies every time; it knows how much fun they have inflicting terror & pain on helpless targets.

The nearest Malick, a narrator of the New Testament, comes to utter condemnation is when “A Hidden Life” portrays German soldiers (often shockingly young) getting right up in Franz’s face and insulting or hitting him this being the kind of sneering gusto that only appears when a bully knows his target can’t fight back. (“Schindler’s List” was good on this point, too.) There is something weirdly exhilarating about watching Nazis scream at a bound-and-gagged Franz, cursing him and insisting that his protests mean nothing. If they do mean nothing, why do they have to scream?

That all-too-human inclination of investing one’s pride, self-worth and (in men especially) machismo in a single government figure is one many countries understand well including the United States. Malick doesn’t give interviews; I don’t think we’d need one to understand why he would release a film like this in 2019 America, where half of us have gone crazy over whether or not it’s OK to criticize the president while the other half screams “Lock her up!” The movie’s dialogue alternates German with English. But the film feels rich enough and sturdy enough to transcend the immediate what it means for us all right now comparisons that it’s sure to invite anyway; not when we’ve seen these dynamics play out before and after World War II, again and again? These are timeless social dynamics.

And yet: Improbably enough for something so relentlessly tragic from start to finish, “A Hidden Life” doesn’t play solely as tragedy. The misery suffered by Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), Fani (Valerie Pachner) and their three daughters is depicted as an extreme version of what everyone experiences as part of life on earth.

You could say it’s all connected: The dull roaring buzz-buzz-buzz of planes passing over the village on their way to and from bombing something; it’s like what happens in Malick’s “The Thin Red Line” when American warships arrive to take Private Witt (Jim Caviezel) away from his pacifist paradise and into the war zone, or when English galleons start sailing up to signal that Powhatan lands are about to be claimed by force of arms in “The New World,” or stretching back before the 20th century, the historical period where half of this film is set when cops or Pinkertons creep up on Holly and Kit in “Badlands” or Bill and Abby in “Days of Heaven” just when they think they’ve lost themselves in some personal Eden.

Did God create evil? Did he create suffering? If so, why? And why is suffering doled out so unevenly, so arbitrarily? Is endurance under pain and injustice a test of faith? If so, is there any defense for that position? Why be moral at all if morality can be canceled out by force, and power knows it can act with impunity because whatever does sting us will not sting them?

These are questions. Malick’s movie offers no answers. As Fani tells us near the end of her tale: All questions will be answered. We wait.

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