The career of Terrence Malick, now seventy-six years old, can be divided into two distinct halves; the early and late work. Malick was once a filmmaker of almost farcical repute. His films arrived so irregularly that each and every one was considered an event. Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line are some of the most critically lauded and influential American films ever made. They are also the only three that Malick produced between 1973 and 1998; a space of twenty-five years. To use an old cliché, Malick was the living embodiment of “quality over quantity”.
The general conception of his late work is as a reversal of this earlier period. The director is more prolific than he’s ever been—but he’s also patchier. His work is loose, improvisational and meandering. Cameras dizzily spin, invert, and float around their subjects. A far cry from the focused features, the measured compositions, of his youth.
A Hidden Life is Malick’s first successful marriage of these two styles. He’s jettisoned a recent penchant for tales of wealthy Angelenos, and turned his lens on an isolated mountain village in Austria during World War Two.
A farmer undertakes a campaign of contentious objection as Nazism begins to sour the atmosphere of his idyllic home. The film is based on the life of Franz Jägerstätter—now a martyr of the Catholic church. Shunned by peers and former friends, and eventually imprisoned, Jägerstätter refused to swear allegiance to Hitler, even in the face of execution. Malick does not attempt to deify, glorify or criticise Jägerstätter’s actions—he simply presents them as they appear in the farmer’s diaries.
There is a skilfully-woven political undercurrent to A Hidden Life, as self-appointed figures of moral authority—ironically, given Jägerstätter’s current status, these are clerical figures—meekly submit to the dictatorial Nazi regime. Member’s of Jägerstätter’s community harass and ostracise his family (it’s worth nothing at this stage a wonderful performance from Valerie Pachner as Jägerstätter’s long-suffering wife Franziska). Those not living in the name of Nazism are spat on, abused and distrusted. It’s a welcome contrast from the happy-go-lucky Nazis of Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit. Malick’s are crueller, but that makes them even more human.
These elements could easily obstruct or disperse the focus of a film. But Malick is too smart a writer—thankfully, once again using scripts—to allow this to happen. Instead, the servility and cowardice of these institutions and people vindicate Jägerstätter’s protests. We gravitate to figures like Oskar Schindler, who “made a difference”. But Malick argues morality is not a goal-oriented pursuit. There is as much valour, as much purpose, in an act of rebellion which achieves nothing as one which saves lives.
This is the reason for the film’s title, taken from a passage in George Eliot’s Middlemarch: “…the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
A Hidden Life is many things: a slice-of-life drama, packed with naturalistic performances, which exposes how Nazism took root in isolated rural communities; a thoughtful critique of groupthink, bandwagoning and perceived moral certainty; a koan-like, open-ended mediation on martyrdom and sacrifice; and a tourist-board worthy showreel of beatific Bavarian hills. But above all, it commemorates an ordinary man who died thinking they would remain anonymous forever. This is all a roundabout way of saying: Malick’s back.
Words by Andrew O’Keefe