A Hid­den Life

“Live by the foma [harm­less untruths] that make you brave and kind and healthy and hap­py.” This is the epi­graph that author Kurt Von­negut uses to launch his 1963 mas­ter­piece ​‘Cat’s Cra­dle’, hooked to the fic­tion­al reli­gion of Bokon­ism. Ter­rence Mal­ick is a Chris­t­ian rather than a Bokon­ist, yet the faith he explores in A Hid­den Life bears more rela­tion to foma than the more dog­mat­ic dic­tates of organ­ised reli­gion. This is a film about a man’s unwa­ver­ing faith enabling him to rebel against the forces of evil, so it’s impor­tant to try to under­stand exact­ly what type of faith is being upheld.

A searcher’s ener­gy expressed through earnest philo­soph­i­cal voiceovers has been a trope of his work ever since his first film, Bad­lands. It’s an ener­gy cranked up dur­ing what is known among fans and detrac­tors alike as ​‘Mal­ick Phase 2’, her­ald­ed by The Tree of Life in 2011. This was the point at which Mal­ick stopped using scripts, allow­ing his actors to roam free in baf­fled awe under the enor­mi­ty of cre­ation. A Hid­den Life rep­re­sents a return to a more nar­ra­tive­ly-con­tained mode of sto­ry­telling, a dash of Phase 1 hold­ing the spir­it of Phase 2 in place, as he takes one idea and pur­sues it through to its con­clu­sion. The idea is: What if your coun­try demand­ed that you swear an oath of alle­giance to Hitler and you refused?

Our sto­ry begins in 1939 in the vil­lage of St Rade­gund, a peace­ful haven in the munic­i­pal­i­ty of Upper Aus­tria. Fani (Valerie Pach­n­er) and Franz (August Diehl) Jägerstätter live on a farm in a moun­tain vale work­ing the land with their three young daugh­ters, his grand­moth­er, and her sis­ter. ​“How sim­ple life was then. It seemed no trou­ble could reach our val­ley… We lived above the clouds,” says Fani. Images show a sim­ple idyll – each day full of good, hon­est toil, apple pick­ing with rosy-cheeked chil­dren, hoe­ing fields of yel­low corn, chop­ping wood, sweep­ing church­es and, in win­ter, shov­el­ling snow. There are mud­dy pigs and a cute donkey.

James New­ton Howard’s score is over­whelm­ing­ly stir­ring, as string and piano notes trav­el high up to heav­en then back down to earth, rev­el­ling in orches­tral music that presents bliss as a state of blithe humil­i­ty. Jörg Widmer’s cam­era is omni­scient, glid­ing from above to below, fol­low­ing lovers on a motor­bike, charg­ing into the whole­some ruckus of fam­i­ly games, push­ing into faces with a lover’s wild impul­sive­ness as Fani gives a sum­ma­tion of how life has been until this cat­a­clysmic year in human history.

Hitler is intro­duced in clips of black-and-white news­reel footage: car­ried on a float through a ral­ly; giv­ing speech­es; goof­ing with a child. There are no grand expos­i­to­ry con­ver­sa­tions where char­ac­ters set out what is hap­pen­ing to Jew­ish peo­ple across Europe. Mal­ick believes that the audi­ence doesn’t need a crash course explain­ing what the Nazis did, and the weight of the film is achieved through what is not shown – the shad­ow­land that Franz refus­es to enter.

His is ini­tial­ly a notion­al refusal. Franz and Fani dis­cuss options (“maybe you could hide in the moun­tains?”) as the dark­ness of nation­al bar­barism insid­i­ous­ly creeps across Rade­gund. Nazis show up at the farm col­lect­ing for the war effort. Gos­sip cir­cu­lates about Franz’s lack of loy­al­ty to the Father­land. For­mer friends refuse to talk to the fam­i­ly. Inevitably there comes a moment when he is called up for nation­al ser­vice, at which point the cou­ple is wrenched apart. Franz is thrown in jail for non-coop­er­a­tion, while Fani is forced to shoul­der a more intense share of the work and bear the bur­den of local hostility.

“You will sure­ly be shot. Your sac­ri­fice would ben­e­fit no one,” says a local priest to Franz while he is still a free man. Lat­er an exas­per­at­ed par­ty dig­ni­tary says, ​“Do you think any­one will ever hear of you? What pur­pose does it serve?” There is some­thing like a myth or a fable in the film’s leit motif of pas­sion­ate dis­suaders launch­ing log­i­cal or emo­tion­al assaults on Franz. He receives these with the same beatif­ic calm with which he responds to cher­ished sym­pa­this­ers. Not once in the course of the film does Franz waver in his belief that it is right to resist fight­ing for Hitler. His con­vic­tion is in stark con­trast to a recent fic­tion­al man of God: Rev­erend Toller, played by Ethan Hawke in Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. He is fren­zied with doubt, won­der­ing how the Almighty could allow an impend­ing cli­mate cat­a­stro­phe to occur.

Franz does not take World War Two or the Holo­caust as a rea­son to ques­tion God’s exis­tence, as the rela­tion­ship he has with Him takes the form of an abstract con­ver­sa­tion on the nature of indi­vid­ual moral­i­ty. God’s perch as an over­seer of all human­i­ty is not broached, as Mal­ick sets out his philo­soph­i­cal stall for a dif­fer­ent type of anguished ques­tion­ing. Is there val­ue in an imprac­ti­cal, pure­ly sym­bol­ic act of anti-fas­cism? Can sac­ri­fic­ing your fam­i­ly and leav­ing them to fend for them­selves be jus­ti­fied on the grounds of non- par­tic­i­pa­tion in evil? It’s hard to get a read on Malick’s view of Franz: does he see his cre­ation as a hero, a saint, or sim­ply an every­man embold­ened by a molten moral core?

While Malick’s head is in the sky, his feet are on the ground in the form of Franz and Fani’s rela­tion­ship, which is so beau­ti­ful, so pure, so equal that it would seem like a fan­ta­sy were it not root­ed, at first, in work­ing the soil and, lat­er, in a writ­ten cor­re­spon­dence that evokes the extent to which they are soul mates. It is a source of mar­vel how nat­u­ral­ly sim­pati­co they are, in mind, body, soul, word, deed and moral out­look. Both emit dig­ni­ty, nei­ther is eas­i­ly riled. They fit togeth­er like a lock and key, lying in each other’s arms in the grass, or talk­ing in hushed tones while she chops herbs with a large knife. Theirs is a com­pan­ion­ship forged in coop­er­at­ing over a dai­ly work­load across many years.

Malick’s pre­vi­ous films Knight of Cups and Song to Song ren­dered the opu­lent back­drops of rich, mobile, met­ro­pol­i­tan peo­ple. The images in A Hid­den Life are agri­cul­tur­al, with one dom­i­nant loca­tion which means the world to these char­ac­ters. Much of Pach­n­er and Diehl’s per­for­mances are cen­tred around work­ing the land, an endeav­our that becomes heav­ier once Franz is absent. He is posi­tioned as the pro­tag­o­nist by dint of the sto­ry pro­ceed­ing from his oblig­a­tion, how­ev­er she has the greater amount of screen time, and the audi­ence is aligned to her posi­tion as the one left behind.

The stakes of A Hid­den Life are the poten­tial loss of their rela­tion­ship and the bereave­ment in their fam­i­ly. All the work that Mal­ick does, deploy­ing his DoP to explore every nook and cran­ny of their life above the clouds, ren­der­ing all details with qui­et eupho­ria, and aims to steadi­ly build up an emo­tion­al res­o­nance that sig­nals how things will end.

The only jar­ring ele­ment in the whole pic­ture is a lack of overt log­ic regard­ing use of lan­guage. Almost all dia­logue is in Eng­lish, yet back­ground char­ac­ters start yelling in Ger­man and some of the Jägerstätters’ lat­er let­ters are nar­rat­ed in Ger­man voiceover. This lan­guage switch seems a whim­si­cal way of intro­duc­ing tonal colour, but it feels slap­dash and out of place in a film that is oth­er­wise as del­i­cate­ly craft­ed as a glassblower’s sculpture.

So, do Franz’s beliefs make him brave and kind and healthy and hap­py? Yes to ​‘brave’, not exact­ly with regard to ​‘health’ and ​‘hap­pi­ness’, although you could argue that these adjec­tives apply to a spir­it that nev­er warped to pres­sure. Mal­ick, as always, uses reli­gious lan­guage in ser­vice of describ­ing some­thing
about the inter­nal land­scape that gives peo­ple the con­vic­tion to stand up and be count­ed, a qual­i­ty that is couched in reli­gious lan­guage here, but needn’t be for us all. ​“I will meet you in the moun­tains,” writes Fani in her final let­ter to Franz. These moun­tains are inter­nal – a place that exists in their shared under­stand­ing of life and each other.

Was it ​‘kind’ of Franz to leave her? This is an answer that requires the most pret­zelled rea­son­ing, still it is a rea­son­ing borne out by the tone of the film which locates the sub­lime even in human sep­a­ra­tion. A Hid­den Life is, under­neath it all, a love sto­ry. The Jägerstätters are a pri­vate micro­cosm imprint­ed by his­to­ry. The Nazi régime is almost inci­den­tal, as these peo­ple could be any­where oppos­ing any evil régime. The sub­stance of the film is buoyed by unselfish, enlight­ened love, shaped by a couple’s faith in each other’s moral­i­ty. What could be kinder than to allow someone’s spir­it to thrive what­ev­er the sac­ri­fice, and in turn to feel their whole­ness intact with­in you in a place sym­bol­ised by moun­tains that still sur­round your place above the clouds?