I was going to see my first movie from director Terrence Malick with 2019’s A Hidden Life. The trailers were showing around the end of the year, and since I don’t live in a major city, I knew I’d have to wait for January or maybe even February to get to see it on a big screen. Whether it actually came out or not in my neck of the woods, I do not recall, but the pandemic came around, I stopped going to theaters, and here we are. I did finally see my first Malick film with The Tree of Life last September and was greatly impressed while recognizing that it wouldn’t be for everyone.
Regardless, I still wanted to see A Hidden Life, and like so many movies I finally get around to seeing, it was leaving HBO Max at the end of the month. Heck, I didn’t even realize it was on the service until it appeared on the “Leaving Soon” menu.
Featuring a cast of German and Austrian actors, the film is based on the true story of Austrian farmer Franz Jagerstatter (August Diehl) and his wife Franziska (Valerie Pachner). Beginning roughly with the two recounting the day they met, this is a story of love for the two of them. However, it’s also the early days of World War II, and after a brief stint in the army, Franz comes home and learns the war is only expanding. He resists going back to the service as long as he can, but when he finally does, he refuses to swear allegiance to Adolph Hitler as required. However, this is not a surprise. Franz is a very devout Catholic and had been questioning the righteousness of Hitler’s cause for quite some time. Everyone seems to be encouraging him to at least go along with everything, but not only is he skipping giving out Nazi salutes, he’s also refusing financial assistance to farmers from the state. He really does want nothing to do with the Nazis. And even as local officials call him a traitor while railing against outsiders and insisting on building walls (how much is this movie a political statement for recent events?), Franz quietly refuses to simply do his “duty to the Fatherland” as one Church official puts it.
By the by, my sister gave me this interesting book as a birthday gift once titled Church of Spies: The Pope’s Secret War Against Hitler, which was about how Pope Pius XII was secretly setting up a spy network to perhaps assassinate Hitler. Pius was doing so very quietly because he was in the middle of fascist Italy and knew full well that many of his priests and Cardinals in Germany and other places were probably more loyal to the Nazis than the Church, so Franz’s experience here checks out.
However, things get worse for the couple when Franz, finally back in the military, refuses to take that oath of loyalty to Hitler. He’s arrested and imprisoned, spending the rest of the movie locked and, when he isn’t writing letters to Franziska, he’s suffering abuse at the hands of the Nazis ranging from psychological torment, solitary confinement, or just pulling chairs out from under him when they order him to sit down–OK, that last one seemed kinda childish, but you get the point–while Franziska at home deals with running a farm by herself with only her three small girls, her sister, and Frantz’s mother for help as they’ve become outcasts in the local community. And through it all, the pair endure as everyone, and I do mean everyone, seems to push for Franz to just sign a piece of paper and spend the rest of the war working in a hospital away from the front. He won’t even do that much. He just believes it’s wrong.
Now, there isn’t a lot of dialogue to this movie, and some of it is in German. However, what we need to hear is in English. Mostly it comes down to one simple thing that no one seems to understand about Franz except for Franziska: he has an inner life that provides him with a sense of freedom no matter what the Nazis do to him, right up to the moment of his execution. Franziska seems to mostly share that trait. And when you can’t even trust the local priests for help, what can you do when your personal belief in God trumps whatever is happening? That’s the key. The Germans assume he’s a coward, or he’s making a political statement, or something, but he isn’t. He’s just a man with a deep spiritual life that can find joy in his memories, knowing full well there are people who have it worse than he does.
The real Franz Jagerstatter is on his way to being name a saint by the Catholic Church, but Malick spends as much time with Franziska as he can to make for a more well-balanced story. Malick likewise uses a wide shot for every scene, emphasizing not only the beauty of the world around the characters whether natural or manmade, but also the solitary nature of both Jagerstatters. They are dwarfed by the world around them, and yet somehow, they find some measure of contentment in life. True, Franz seems to do better that way, but there’s a warmth to the two of them and the strength they demonstrate as something that would have probably broken lesser people. Truly, this would have been a good movie to break my Malick cherry on, but it worked out just fine for me in the end regardless.
Besides, I really needed a better class of movie after the crap that was both Red Sonja and 9 1/2 Weeks.
Grade: A
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