Terrence Malick’s latest film, the World War II drama A Hidden Life, is not about President Trump, Viktor Orban, the Proud Boys, Antifa, Angela Merkel’s immigration policy, or anything else particular to our moment. It’s barely about Nazis or World War II, though these realities set the film’s central conflicts in motion. Based on the true story of Franz Jagerstatter, an Austrian farmer who defied the Nazi regime by refusing to make an oath of loyalty to the Fuhrer, A Hidden Life is a portrait of one man’s conscientious refusal to do evil.
When the film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May, some critics reported that Malick, the ivory tower impresario of ethereal, contemplative cinema, had apparently written and directed a rejoinder to our tense, troubled times. In one of the film’s voice-overs, Franz asks his wife, “What has become of our country?” Some early reviewers clearly heard in this an echo of their own contemporary puzzlement.
Malick isn’t terribly concerned with the present, per se. His interest lies in the human condition as it has existed from time immemorial. We love to believe that modernity, the internet, capitalism, individualism, the 2016 election, or some other historical wrong turn has thrown us off course. Malick’s films have sometimes flirted with this kind of nostalgia, but he’s too smart, finally, to believe in it. In his cinematic universe, there’s no time or place where humans are exempt from our fated, lifelong wrestling match with self, other, and world.
For Franz, the central task is learning how to be free no matter what the world throws at you. In his case, the world throws quite a lot. The first portion of the nearly three-hour film finds Franz living a bucolic life in the mountains of western Austria with his devoted wife, Fani, and their lovely daughters. The Jagerstatters are sustained by the rough fecundity of the soil; their simple, sincere faith; and the warm embrace of St. Radegunde, their small village. It’s a hard life, but a joyful one.
Adolf Hitler has grander plans for the soil, though, and soon Franz is called up to serve. His terse, stubborn distaste for the dictator has already angered many in St. Radegunde, but at his official military swearing-in, he refuses to recite the oath of loyalty to Hitler and is imprisoned. There follows a long period of confinement and abuse, punctuated by Franz’s affectionate correspondence with Fani and various attempts by friends, family, jurists, and more than a couple of Nazis to convince him that his execution will gain nothing for the cause of justice.
Franz’s anguished but unflappable conviction is both difficult to watch and stirring to the point of tears. You should walk out of the theater feeling personally challenged: What kind of courage and strength do you possess? Is there anything you would die for? Franz refuses to compromise his understanding of true and false, right and wrong, and since he values these things more than his life, he cannot be coerced. Even when he is offered noncombatant service as a medic (a post the real-life Franz requested but was denied), he still refuses to say that he will be loyal to Hitler. Malick’s Franz is intensely, absolutely free, even in chains. Immanuel Kant wrote that only two things filled him with awe: “the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” Malick’s films have always been concerned with the former; this is the first in which he’s argued intensively for the latter.
Malick is one of the very few living filmmakers who so relishes challenging his audience. His greatest cinematic achievement, 2011’s The Tree of Life, counseled a radical Christian ethic of humble self-giving, “the way of Grace,” and he made it look absolutely beautiful. One of the stars of that film, Jessica Chastain, has said in interviews that she can’t bear to watch her performance because the movie, in which she played “a character who was the embodiment of love,” was “the high point of [her] life.”
The heroism of A Hidden Life rings out in a different key but is equally bracing and beautiful. And yet, the hero is only part of the story. The hardest scenes to watch are not those depicting the suffering of Franz, which have a masculine grandeur to them, a noble purity that makes them bracing. Rather, they are the scenes showing the consequences of Franz’s decision for Fani and their children: They are left without protection to be abused, ostracized, and even robbed by the villagers of St. Radegunde, tilling hard soil with only the aid of Fani’s sister because no one will help them or even buy their produce.
Fani, like many of Malick’s women, is a perfect wife. She eventually goes all-in on Franz’s moral quest, telling him simply to do what’s right, come what may. But does he have the right? Should his three young daughters grow up fatherless and despised so that Franz’s conscience may remain unstained? Will the knowledge of their father’s uncompromising nobility compensate for their loneliness? Does his resistance even matter in the cosmic scheme of things? If you’re sure of the answers to these questions, you’re made of surer stuff than I am.
For much of the film, it’s hard to say how convinced Malick is that Franz is in the right — a number of the arguments advanced against his martyrdom ring with sincerity and good sense. But the final shot is a quote from George Eliot, from which the film takes its name:
If this is the criterion by which we are to judge Franz’s actions, it is very difficult to see how they are entirely justified — how exactly might the “growing good” have been hampered if Franz agreed to mumble a few dumb, evil words and then serve honorably as a medic? But even if they aren’t, they may still be beautiful, awe-inspiring, challenging. Many great works of art sketch out a way of life that the artist has glimpsed, aspired to, but never really touched; an occasional overreach is an occupational hazard. Is A Hidden Life one such overreach? Or is Malick simply gazing at a higher moral plane than some of us are able to see?
