A Hidden Life

A HIDDEN LIFE   ***

Terrence Malick

2019

IDEA:  Based on the true story of Austrian peasant Franz Jägerstätter, who refused to vow his oath to Hitler during World War II. 

BLURB:  Verdant mountains extend as far as the eye can see, towering into the sky, shimmering in streams of crystal water as implacable and enveloping as the blankets of rolling mist. The pastoral Alpine landscape of A Hidden Life is as quintessentially a breathing monument to the sublimity of nature as Malick has ever conjured, an earthly cathedral that invites our full-bodied reverence. For the first half of the film it appears in nearly every shot, wide-angle lenses wrapping it around the characters, rendering the very condition of being-in-the-world as an inextricable, continuous intertwinement with a splendor that is always there, even when your consciousness intends elsewhere. As ever, Malick is all about guiding it back. In A Hidden Life, perhaps more than ever before, he does this with laser-focused political intent, framing the spectacular plenitude of nature as a constant, cosmic rebuke to the festering evil of fascism. Through the unwaveringly principled Franz, a humble steward of that nature, Malick conveys how moral responsibility is a fortifying act allied with social and ecological perdurance. To turn one’s back on virtue, he argues, is not merely to abandon personal ethics but to diminish all of the world. Frustratingly, A Hidden Life sheds some of its power as that diminution is forced upon Franz, the tautological scenes of his imprisonment tending to blunt both theme and affect. But at its best, the film invokes the awesome magnitude of life beyond the bounds of our futilely constricting human systems, and attains its poignancy by wondering what the world might be like if conscientiousness didn’t so often have to be an audacious position.