The morbid monotony of ‘A Hidden Life’ (2019)
★★★★½ — Terrence Malick’s ode to integrity stars August Diehl and Valerie Pachner
On Monday, January 20th, at 19:07, the screen showing Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life at my local theatre is deserted. I’m not early—seven minutes ‘late’ according to Cineworld’s advert-bloated schedule—but I’m unfazed by the sight of empty seats before me: a three-hour film about Nazi conscription is a hard sell any day of the week. Over the next fifteen minutes, about ten others enter; two people will later have an argument in the back row, and one couple will leave about twenty minutes before the end. The lights dim, the adverts crawl by, and—with more than a pinch of irony—so begins Malick’s ode to the unsung heroes of WWII: the Third Reich’s conscientious objectors.
I say ‘ode’ because I think it is misleading to describe the film solely as, well, a film. Fans of Tarkovsky, for one, will find themselves at home with Malick here, but others should be warned that A Hidden Life is a beautiful but macabre experience that requires a lot of patience to even tolerate, let alone enjoy—hence, I think, the distractions of my fellows in the audience. War films are often stereotyped as action films but Malick’s sits about as far from the genre as it is possible to sit: barely is there ‘action’ of any kind, and often even dialogue is scarce. A Hidden Life is as close to poetry as cinema can get—visual poetry, told through the language of the camera.
The plot follows the rationale and repercussions of a single but calamitous decision in an Austrian couple’s life, as Franz and Fanny Jägerstätter question the legitimacy of the Austro-German war against the Allies. Franz has served, briefly, for the Nazis before: conscripted for training in 1941, he was quickly exempted to return to work his farm as an essential part of the wartime economy. After this narrow escape from the conflict, a brief respite at home in the mountains with his wife, mother and sister-in-law soon sours into the dread of re-conscription that stirs unquietly for the film’s first half.
His family, expanding steadily to include three young daughters, is shadowed by the threat of execution for soldiers, clergy and officials who refuse to swear allegiance to Hitler. As with the real Franz Jägerstätter (who had opposed Hitler, Anschluss, eugenics and war from the beginning) Malick’s Franz quickly comes to understand that his moral objections to the war run too deep to obey the inevitable call to arms, even in the interests of self-preservation. The cause of the Allied defenders in their homelands now seems to him the just one—the Reich’s overreaction to the restrictions placed upon them by the Treaty of Versailles, as well as emerging knowledge of the Nazi’s eugenics programs, have far overstepped the mark for the devout farmer. Conscription into such an evil regime becomes so horrifying an idea that it would be a spiritual death sentence in itself.
Importantly, Franz and Fanny are not exceptional people, neither in personality nor appearance (I mention the latter only because it is a welcome break from the usual beautifying commonplace in Hollywood). The only exceptional part of their lives are the circumstances in which they find themselves, and the admirable way that they react to them. Malick’s is not a film that could have worked with any faces more famous than Diehl’s and Pachner’s in front of the lens, I don’t think; it would have seemed inauthentic. It is crucial for us to understand in no uncertain terms that when tolerance of evil becomes the norm, pariahdom can (and does) happen to good, ordinary people.
The film is meditative to an extreme, its conflict built up brick by brick rather than leaping through sequences of eventful plot points. Political arguments with friends prompt dirty looks thrown across the street. Refusals to perform the Sieg Heil salute turn glares into insults and thrown stones. Soon, the Jägerstätters find themselves outcast, their daughters bullied and isolated, and their crops stolen in broad daylight without hope of justice or retribution. And every day, the mailman’s bicycle bell marks the march of time towards the inevitable, eliciting Pavlovian fears in characters and audience alike that today will be the day Franz receives that letter of conscription which will force him to choose between the hard path and the wrong path.
There are sequences throughout the film that can be described only as morbidly boring. Not in the sense that they inspire apathy or tedium, but rather an unceasing weariness and a firm desire for the film to be over, that we may head home and cry ourselves to sleep sooner rather than later. The film never pivots or spirals, never flinches or retreats, but trundles in a straight line towards deeper and deeper despair. Watching the same events repeat day-in-day-out fosters extreme dread, and the snail’s pacing makes Malick’s narrative highly unpredictable; we know that Franz’s conscription letter must come eventually, but each time we anticipate its arrival, we find the inevitable delayed once again. It inspires something that is greater than the usual vicarious fear one feels for a character caught in a vice: it is genuine anxiety, fruitless and uncathartic.
Yet, as tragedy looms, Franz and Fanny never lose sight of hope completely. It is hope not necessarily for their own survival but for something greater to emerge because of their actions. Faith is one of the pillars of their resilience, as it is one of the foundations of Franz’ moral objections to the war. Love, too, keeps the pair strong: Fanny’s adoration is unconditional upon his decision, devastating though it might be for her and their children. But something greater than both of these pillars endures in Franz, even when God and Fanny feel too distant to help. Even when he is held at the mercy of the Nazis, supported only by a state-provided lawyer and local priest (both of whom who urge him to submit to the regime and take the ‘Hitler Oath’), a pure and stubborn belief survives in Franz and keeps him from faltering. It is the belief that a moral life is better than either a safe one or a long one: ‘Better to suffer injustice than to commit it.’
Despair and resilience are two sides of the same coin in the second half of A Hidden Life. In a sense, they both precipitate one another. The more resilient Franz is, the more despair the Nazis must inflict to break him—but the worse his treatment becomes, the more crucial it is that Franz remains strong lest he proves their inhumane methods effective.
Malick captures this tandem of despair and resilience through a contrast between Jörg Widmer’s cinematography and the cast’s subdued acting. Rather than displaying the characters’ despair through highly emphatic, ‘Oscar-bait’-type performances, Diehl and Pachner remain reticent, while Malick’s camera articulates the turmoil they must hide from their persecutors. Hand-held cameras suspended disconcertingly at chest height ebb back and forward to convey, at times, the intense intimacy between Franz and Fanny. Malick’s trademark affinity with the pastoral is, naturally, all but omnipresent, his camera moving among the grass as if the world itself was as important a subject as any individual. When Franz and Fanny are left together in their corner of the natural world, the fluid movements of the handheld cameras capture the tranquillity of their hidden life. When the camera moves away from the couple and the natural world, the same extreme close-ups begin to feel like an intrusion, mimicking the increasing anxiety they feel as they are subjected to the constant harassment of Nazi supporters and soldiers. A ‘hidden life’ ceases to mean a stoic life, but one forcibly silenced.
At other times, the cinematography is not fluid but intentionally jolty. Cuts between shots taken across parallel axēs emulate the sense of extreme disorientation one feels during moments of severe anxiety. In these moments, we, like Franz, feel displaced and untethered; we believe we are in one place within the scene, only for the camera to cut to a different shot viewing the same angle from a position a few steps forward or to the side; as if we were tapping in and out of consciousness and stumbling with fear and disbelief, we find ourselves thrown about the room, displaced and uncomfortable. An occasional lack of correlation between audio and video (which I believe was intentional, as it was inconsistent) furthers our sense of disorientation, as does the unsubtitled German dialogue during moments of conflict. Like experiencing an inescapable nightmare, it is often hard to tell where we are supposed to be in the scene, or if we are meant to be in it at all.
When the film’s epigraph fades in on the final black screen, an extract from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Malick gifts his audience the same hope that drives his characters. It wouldn’t do to quote the epigraph here, cleft from the film; Eliot’s words would be comparatively ineffectual, for they are resolved by the rest of A Hidden Life as wonderfully as the film is, in turn, resolved by Eliot’s words. The film is more than a story crafted to entertain. It is an ode of express admiration for the good people of the world like Jägerstätter who put themselves through hell for their dream of a moral world.
