A Hidden Life

“There’s a difference between the kind of suffering we cant avoid, and the suffering we choose.”

While legacies are about what we leave for the future, we search for examples of them in the past.  Stories are written about the men and women who have changed the world by inspiring others, for good or ill.  And because many of us are afraid of death, we worry about what we’ll leave behind once we’re gone, or if it will even matter.  In truth, for those who loved us it will matter a great deal, but then it will matter less for the ones who come after them, eventually leaving our legacy to fade into recorded thoughts, not remembered ones.  So it begs the question of how important a legacy truly should be to a person, if in the end it matters more to find peace in life as opposed to importance in death.  Or if we owe our virtues to only ourselves, even if we can’t take them with us.

These are the kind of thoughts I want a Terrence Malick film to make me ponder, and his A Hidden Life is his first movie since Tree of Life to make me do so.  It’s also his best since that film.

Malick loves to tell stories about human beings who crumble set against the backdrop of the majesty of our planet. Sometimes that results in masterpieces; other times it fails miserably into a parody of itself. Since the excellent Tree of Life, Malick has churned out the underwhelming To The Wonder, the awful Knight of Cups, and the decent Song to Song.  I enjoyed the latter film because unlike Knight of Cups, Song to Song at least had an overall theme.  A current that ran through the film despite it being a disjointed effort.  The drawbacks of Malick’s visual poetic way of telling his stories is that without much of a narrative, his films can feel adrift, even borderline-lost.  That’s where A Hidden Life has an advantage, as it’s his first film since The New World to have a true narrative.  This affords Malick a backbone to build his ideas upon.

A Hidden Life is based on the true story of  Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), who lives in small village of St. Radegund, Austria in 1939 as a farmer.  He and his wife, Franziska “Fani” (Valerie Pachner) live a simple life with their three young daughters as a part of the rural community in St. Radegund’s unmatched countryside. Of course things change once Germany declares war on France, forcing Franz to go off to training, and eventually be called to fight well after France surrenders.  The problems for Franz is that, unlike everyone else in the town, he opposes the views of Hitler and Nazi Germany, leaving him and his wife to become an outcast in their village.  Worse is that his conscientious objection will be seen in the German command as treason, meaning imprisonment and the possibility of death.

Malick’s various shots of nature, while always gorgeous, can fall flat if they carry no emotional weight, and even veer into pretentious territory.  Luckily in  A Hidden Life they’re almost always successfully used in their juxtaposition to what else is going on in the story. Once Franz is separated from his wife and sent to prison, he often thinks of home, using it as a strength to endure his new harsh surroundings.  As we see and hear people speak with harsh cruelty in the film, we’re constantly reminded of the beauty in the world, and how insignificant it makes said cruelty in comparison.  Malick achieves this through impeccable cinematography, stirring music, and tenderly performed narration by the two lead actors.

The film runs nearly three hours, and therein lies some of its issues.  While I found the opening and concluding acts to be powerful and beautiful, the middle act gets bogged down in scenes that could have been trimmed or cut entirely.  It’s in this middle hour where Malick loses some of that backbone to his story and goes a bit rouge, unnecessarily stretching an already long movie.  Specifically scenes inside the prison where characters we don’t care about spew profound rhetoric that simply doesn’t land the emotional punches Malick wants.  Luckily the film recovers in its final hour and delivers some staggering moments of tragic beauty.  One of my favorites, near the story’s conclusion, was the subtle sound of a blackbird in the distance, once again reminding the protagonist of what has brought him strength in a time of need.  For those unfamiliar with Malick, I’d wager this won’t be for you, not at least until you get familiar.  For others, I believe they’ll feel like me and see this as a return to form.

August Diehl and Valerie Pachner are the perfect match, both in joy and sorrow.  They are one another’s strengths, and even though they spend a good majority of the film apart, I saw them as one.  Diehl has more to work with, as his character is put through more of wringer, but Pachner inspires just as much sympathy.  The cinematography by long-time Malick camera operator, Jörg Widmer, doesn’t miss a beat from his past works…meaning this is a feast for the eyes.  There’s a bit more grittiness in some scenes, and that’s a welcome change when it’s there.  The score by James Newton Howard is appropriately operatic, with help from some classics by Bach and others.

When the film ended, I began to think about the people in my past who I know very little about, ancestors that had full lives.  And while they may not have changed the world, or the way others thought, the choices they made brought me here.  I suppose, to me, they lived hidden lives, but those lives were full of moments that were memorable to them.  I carry those invisible memories with me thanks to Malick and random shots of mountains and fields.

Grade: A-