A Hidden Life (2019), Terrence Malick

As Terrence Malick’s first feature Badlands (1973) comes to a close, its protagonist (played by Martin Sheen) has been arrested for his spree of killings and is being extradited back to South Dakota. The final, magisterial shot depicts the heavens as seen from the perspective of the plane taking him there. Some forty-six years later, A Hidden Life, Malick’s newest film, opens with a resumption of this same vantage. This time, however, the majesty of the original strikes us as pared down. The wide, richly-colored canvas of Badlands has been narrowed and drained of color. We are viewing the opening to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), that supreme work of Nazi propaganda, wherein Hitler descends from the clouds onto his annual rally in Nuremburg. If Riefenstahl’s film was intent on selling Hitler to its viewers, Malick’s is devoted to commemorating the life of one of his victims, Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter.

The true story is a relatively straightforward one. Franz, played by German actor August Diehl, lives in the Austrian Alps with his wife Fani (played by Austrian Valerie Pachner), three little daughters, widowed mother and Fani’s sister Resie (Maria Simon). Their pastoral existence is quickly encroached upon by Hitler’s rise. While the Nazis idealized farming and rural living as the sacred domain of all things properly German (note the glorified peasant farmers marching in the film’s Triumph of the Will excerpt), Franz does not fit their “Blood and Soil” mold. His mountains are not those of Leni Riefenstahl’s mountain films, not the bastions of German nationalism the Nazis made them out to be. A devout Christian and man of principle, Franz does not hide his opposition to Hitler and consequently suffers, along with his family, increasing ostracization from his small community. The decisive moment comes when he is called up for military service and must swear a vow of allegiance to Hitler. Refusing the vow, despite being repeatedly warned from the beginning of the film that to do so will surely mean death, he is imprisoned and tortured at length before finally being executed. Franz, his family and the audience watch and wait in agony throughout the film’s almost three hours as this terrifying and near-certain finality draws ever closer. 

Although work on the film began before the election of Donald Trump, it is hard to view A Hidden Life without seeing in it a warning to our own historical moment, with its rise of xenophobia, authoritarianism and illiberal democracy (“Blood and Soil” was itself chanted at Charlottesville in 2017). The film is similar in this respect to Christian Petzold’s Transit (2018), a work that merges historical fascism with our own perilous present. (Transit’s lead actor, Franz Rogowski, also stars in A Hidden Life, delivering a masterful performance as Waldland, another victim of Hitler’s regime who becomes a close friend to Franz.) If Leni Riefenstahl used cinema to bring a narrow, fascist vision to the masses, Malick’s film is an earnest attempt to show us something wider, more colorful, more fundamentally compelling. When Franz is forced to view a Nazi propaganda film during military training, he looks away in disgust while those around him rally with enthusiasm. The stakes of culture, the film would seem to suggest, are high. Malick challenges us to reflect on these connections during a scene in which the local church painter speaks to Franz about their congregation. While the townsfolk like to think they would have been among the “good ones” if they could travel back to Christ’s time, he declares, in actuality they would “have murdered whom they now adore.” Would we have been as heroic as Franz? Are we being as heroic now? 

While the townsfolk enjoy seeing representations of “the comfortable Christ,” the painter tells Franz that someday he’ll paint “the true Christ.” Jägerstätter, who was declared a martyr and beatified by the Catholic Church, incarnates Christ’s own suffering repeatedly throughout the film. Malick’s work, which has always had a numinous hue to it, is at its most explicitly Christian here. Religious art and music populate the film, which begins with an excerpt from Handel’s oratorio Israel in Egypt: a fitting introduction for a work that is itself an oratorio of sorts, similarly focused on dramatizing the sacred and saintly. Malick uses music frequently to conjoin Jägerstätter and Christ’s suffering: excerpts from Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion describe the “bridegroom,” Christ, being slaughtered, Wojciech Kilar’s Agnus Dei (“Lamb of God”) accompanies Franz’s final refusal to save himself from execution, and his execution sequence begins with Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, which itself weaves together Christ’s death with those of World War II victims. Characters quote from the Gospel of Matthew throughout the film, and the story of Franz—a man in his thirties who from the beginning knows he will soon be killed—parallels that of the Gospel in many ways.   

The film’s Christian framework also extends to the various women in Franz’s life, all of whom must repeatedly suffer and endure the persecution brought on by his choices. Over Franz and Fani’s bed hangs a painting of the Virgin Mary tending to the child Jesus, playing alongside his (symbolically sacrificial) lamb. When Fani visits various Nazi headquarters in an attempt to aid her imprisoned husband, we are repeatedly met with variations of this painting. As in Malick’s Song to Song (2017), in which a da Vinci drawing of the Virgin Mary appears in connection to Rooney Mara’s character (“Doesn’t she look like you?” says Patti Smith to a lovelorn Mara), the figure of Mary stands in for female loss and suffering. A Hidden Life is every bit as interested in tracing this female suffering as it is in following Franz’s own. As if to make the point, Fani writes to an imprisoned Franz about his “three little women,” aligning the film with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, another work about the trials wives and children must endure when men are absent during wartime. All of this is not surprising, given that most of Malick’s films have traced the travails women must undergo at the hands of distant (To the Wonder), absent (Song to Song) or deceased (The New World, Days of Heaven) male lovers and relatives. The film’s religious-tinged music—particularly Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, whose text conjoins Mary’s suffering over Christ’s death and the suffering of mothers who have lost children in the political violence of the twentieth century, and Arvo Pärt’s Sarah Was Ninety Years Old, which similarly evokes the prospect of female suffering over a lost son—further serves to accentuate the women’s hardship. 

Apart from its music, imagery and biblical allusions, A Hidden Life also operates as a Christian film in more subtle ways. The local painter—perhaps the closest any figure comes to a stand-in for fellow artist Malick—declares that “we create sympathy, not followers.” This is in keeping with Franz’s outlook, as he continually refuses to cast the first stone against his compatriots for their choices. When hauled before the chief Nazi magistrate, played by legendary German actor Bruno Ganz, Franz professes that he is not judging him nor anyone else. The film itself follows Franz’s lead, even briefly showing members of the Nazi bureaucracy in private moments of torment or doubt. After Franz leaves Ganz’s chambers, for instance, a troubled Ganz sits in the chair where Franz formerly sat, the same medium shot that framed Franz now framing Ganz. [This entire military tribunal sequence, as well as the final point-of-view execution scene, are both visually and narratively strongly evocative of Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957).] In its relentless empathy for its characters, A Hidden Life calls to mind one of the central themes of Middlemarch, that other “study of provincial life” from which the film takes its name. 

In creating “sympathy, not followers,” Malick’s film avoids the simple dogmatism and moral pontificating that other works of religiously-infused cinema can often convey (take the first episode of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog, for instance). While it venerates Jägerstätter, his righteous wife and family are left to wonder aloud why suffering has come to them. In this respect, the film echoes much of Malick’s earlier work, most notably Tree of Life (2011). That film begins with an epigraph from the Book of Job, a work that explores the extreme suffering God unleashes upon his devout servant Job. Halfway through the film, a pastor sermonizes that sorrow could find any of us at any time, as it did Job. “Job thought he could build his nest on high and he’d be OK,” he preaches. These words are closely echoed by comments from Franz and Fani: “I thought that we could build our nest up high in the trees—fly away like birds into the mountains” (the opening lines of the film, delivered by Franz) and Fani’s declaration that “it seemed no trouble could reach our valley. We lived above the clouds.” As in Tree of Life, in which a family must reckon with the horrifying loss of a child, the central questions at the heart of Job are once again wrestled with by Malick’s characters. There are no easy answers here as to why suffering happens to good people, no religious balm for unthinkable loss. 

Amidst all the terror in A Hidden Life are also images of stunning natural beauty. (As Franz tells us, “nature does not notice the sorrow that has come over the people.”) Malick worked with cinematographer Jörg Widmer, who has been with him since Malick’s 2005 film The New World. Shot primarily on a mix of Steadicam and handheld camera, the film is marked by a peripatetic visual style in keeping with these earlier works. When the camera does stop moving, the resulting frames evoke masterful painterly compositions, ranging from still lifes of fruit (think early Dutch painting) to stunning landscapes framed through narrow doorways (think German Romanticism). These worlds are further brought to life through a rich sonic landscape (sounds of animals, wind chimes, running water, footsteps in the mud and snow) that pervades the film. 

Malick is famous for his emphasis on authenticity. In The New World, to take just one example, a linguist was brought on to teach his actors to correctly speak an extinct Native American language. It is this commitment to authenticity that lends A Hidden Life one of its most haunting aspects: much of it was filmed on the actual locations where the story took place, including Franz’s home and some of the prisons where he was held. Since the court where Franz was condemned has been converted into apartments, Malick filmed the trial at a nearby court, the Berlin Kammergericht, which has a similar history to the one where Franz was tried. Watching a reenactment of Nazi persecution on the same grounds where that persecution took place is absolutely chilling, calling to mind Claude Lanzmann’s practice of returning to these same sites to film. Haunting period footage woven into the film achieves a similar effect, including a shot of a train pulling into Berlin’s Anhalter Bahnhof, the (now demolished) station from which the city’s Jews were deported to the camps. Adding to the authenticity are the voiceovers, an ongoing dialogue between Franz and Fani drawn primarily from the real letters they wrote to one another when Franz was imprisoned, letters to which Malick purchased the rights when planning the film. 

While the story of A Hidden Life is told in large part through the aid of its voiceover, that most characteristic Malickian feature, it relies more on direct dialogue than his most recent slate of films (Song to Song, Knight of Cups, To the Wonder). Whereas shooting for these earlier films was often only tangentially tied to their scripts, with ad-lib footage only later worked into a coherent whole through Malick’s characteristically painstaking editing process, for A Hidden Life Malick returned to his earlier practice of sticking more closely to the script. Gone also are the dream sequences, hallucinations, temporal play and frequent opacity of those earlier works. The result is a film that, while lacking none of the found wonder and spontaneity those other films captured, nevertheless remains more narratively driven and cohesive. 

The care with which Franz’s story has been plotted is evident in A Hidden Life’s subtle but powerful narrative use of sound and mise-en-scène. Franz is portrayed as a doomed man from the first shot of the film (following the Riefenstahl excerpts): we see him standing before the mountains with his back to the camera, like a Rückenfigur out of Caspar David Friedrich, reaping the harvest with a large scythe. It is an image at once beautiful and ominous, like the bell that tolls repeatedly throughout the film, eventually to be rung for Franz himself after he finally meets the guillotine blade. In a judge’s chambers in Berlin, Franz’s death sentence nearly certain, a painting on the far wall, just to his left in the frame, shows Franz’s increasingly distant Alpine home. An empty crib always sits alongside Franz and Fani’s bed, a placeholder for the next child that will not come. When Fani asks Franz if he would like another child in a tormented attempt to convince him to save his own life, the image only takes on more poignancy. Such a refined level of artistry strongly argues for the success of Malick’s return to form.   

Franz’s story is also brought movingly to life through the outstanding acting in the film. August Diehl delivers a visceral performance, relaying Franz’s dueling determination and inner anguish, particularly through his facial expressions and body language. The same is true of Valerie Pachner and Franz Rogowski as Fani and Waldland. Rogowski in particular has an almost uncanny ability to evoke humor and pathos at the same moment. The only time the performances are weakened is when the film rather awkwardly mixes German and English (no doubt more striving after authenticity), which renders certain interactions downright ludicrous. It is, however, one of very few flaws in the film. 

For a director of his age, Terrence Malick has made relatively few films, but undoubtedly many masterpieces. A Hidden Life is one of them.