Most war films celebrate the heroism of soldiers who fought for their nations, but Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life (2019) is about a soldier who does the exact opposite. A Hidden Life is about a German soldier during World War II who refuses to join in the war efforts of the Nazi party. Like Malick’s previous films, A Hidden Life is ultimately an exploration of a man’s search for a deeper spiritual meaning in his life. The soldier in Malick’s film sees the darkness and brutality of Germany’s slide into Nazism, and tries to make sense of it through a deeper connection with God.
A Hidden Life is set in 1940s Germany and based on the true story of the conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl) and his wife Fani (Valerie Pachner). As the film begins, Franz, Fani and their daughters live an idyllic and peaceful existence on their farm in the village of Radegund. However, the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party is still felt in the village, as evidenced by the patriotic Mayor (Karl Markovics) who constantly badgers Franz to join the war effort. Although Franz at first refuses to join the army, he eventually is drafted into the war effort. Franz leaves Radegund to prepare for battle, but he refuses to fight, leading to his imprisonment and torture.
A Hidden Life feels very much like the film that Malick has been working towards his whole career. Malick’s legendary status began in the 1970s when he burst into the cinematic landscape with two astonishingly accomplished films that heralded the arrival of a major talent. Malick then disappeared for almost two decades, and didn’t make another film again until 1999 with his World War II set epic The Thin Red Line. Malick then returned in 2005 with another historical period piece with The New World, followed up by The Tree of Life a few years later.
After The Tree of Life, Malick went on a filmmaking binge, with four films almost back to back from the years 2012 to 2017. Malick’s two previous historical epics The Thin Red Line and The New World were ambitious but flawed films that felt like a director who was re-learning the art of filmmaking after a long absence (indeed, as mentioned before, Malick hadn’t made a film for almost two decades before that point). While there were incredibly crafted scenes of spiritual and visceral beauty in these two films, they also felt meandering and muddled at points. The Tree of Life was a more structured and accomplished work than The Thin Red Line and The New World, but it also contained some jarring thematic detours that didn’t quite gel into an aesthetically coherent whole.
Then, Malick seemingly went off the deep end with his next three films To The Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Song To Song. Malick shot these three films without a script, and by all accounts the productions of the films were scatter shot and without focus. The films themselves were seemingly randomly improvised scenes strung together in post-production by druggy, sleepy voice-overs that sounded like hippies trapped in an endless time warp of the 1960s. While Malick’s usual thematic concerns about the search for God and meaning in a spirituality impoverished world were inherent within these films, they ultimately were too meandering and incoherent to function as satisfying works of art.
With A Hidden Life, Malick finally settled down and created a film with a tightly structured script and shooting schedule, and the result is Malick’s best film in years. In fact, A Hidden Life is as powerful as Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light and Martin Scorsese’s Silence in its portrayal of spiritual struggle. Like these films, A Hidden Life is an emotionally devastating examination of the search for meaning in a cruel and indifferent world. As Franz wrestles with his belief in a higher power while his Nazi captors endlessly torture him, Malick’s film reminds one of St. John of the Cross’ 16th century poem The Dark Night of the Soul.
By basing A Hidden Life on a true story, and setting it in confined locations, Malick is able to focus his skills in a more effective manner than his previously unstructured films. The scenes of religious and spiritual torment no longer feel out of place as they did in To The Wonder, which awkwardly cut back and forth between Javier Bardem’s tormented priest and Ben Affleck’s search to constantly get laid. Indeed, the cumulative impact of Franz’s journey to find God culminates in an emotionally devastating last act.
Malick poetically contrasts the bucolic and pastoral natural beauty of Franz’s village of Radegund with the dark and grimy Nazi prisons where Franz is imprisoned. In this sense, Malick is pointing us forward as a species towards the almost Eden-like existence of Franz and Fran and their peaceful connection with nature (much like how Malick portrayed indigenous tribes in The Thin Red Line and Native Americans in The New World). In a way, Malick’s films function as a time capsule for how we can co-exist peacefully, and A Hidden Life is his purest expression of this. A Hidden Life is not only a portrait of the horrors of Nazi Germany, but also a stirring and powerful reminder of the goodness of the human spirit amidst unspeakable cruelty.
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