A Hidden Life (Terrence Malick, 2019)

Terrence Malick has always been a more spiritual filmmaker than a political one, but changing times bring out unexpected facets in those we think we know well. A Hidden Life is essentially about the power of Christian faith and the refusal of a true believer to capitulate to a dominant evil simply for expediency's sake. It's hardly a stretch to call this Malick's "Trump film," but I'm sure some of the filmmaker's admirers would consider that a reductive way of looking at it.

In the Austrian village of Radegund, the farmer Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl) lives with his adoring wife Fanni (Valerie Pachner), their three daughters, Franz;s mother (Karin Neuhauser), and Fanni's sister Resie (Maria Simon). Soon after the Anschluss, the various townsfolk are expected to adapt to life under the Nazis. But Franz refuses to fight for the Germans and, more damning, will not pledge allegiance to Hitler. So he is arrested, his family shunned and torn asunder, and he eventually pays the ultimate price for his conscientious refusal.

At just over three hours, A Hidden Life has all the room it needs to accommodate the philosophical and religious concepts that underpin the story, ideas that have been at the heart of Malick's best films. But what is strange about the film is how little it actually delves into Jägerstätter's protest, his faith, or his overall psychology. Instead, the film takes his rejection of the Nazis as a basic fact, one related to his membership in the Church but never expounded upon. This would appear to be because Malick has instead chosen to depict Franz's actions as somehow natural or reflexive, rather than the culmination of extensive soul-searching.

In fact, much of A Hidden Life remains maddeningly surface level. In the opening segments, we see Franz and his family working and playing in the wide open landscape, tilling the soil one minute, playing hide-and-seek the next. Malick shows the pre-Hitler Jägerstätters in an almost edenic state of grace, completely at home in the land.  This pre-cultural, Heideggerian Being is too good to be true, and is simplistic to a fault. A Hidden Life spends its running time expounding on good versus evil, but implicitly equates goodness with simplicity. Are we to understand that those who resisted Hitler were doing so out of a kind of humble naivety? 

From its often childlike, incantatory voiceover to its Romanticist vistas of earth and sky, A Hidden Life elaborates its tale not as a set of competing political or social visions, but as the absence of politics versus the encroaching presence of it. This is frustrating, because it valorizes Franz's sacrifice without ultimately articulating it as a position, one for which he and others must take responsibility. And if this is where we are in contemporary political art -- nostalgic longing for a prelapsarian return to normality, rather than the presentation of a counter-narrative -- then we are in worse trouble than I thought.