Franz Jägerstätter on his motorcycle as a young man
Franz Jägerstätter and Franziska Schwaninger on their wedding day in 1936
Franz Jägerstätter in the military uniform he hated
A HIDDEN LIFE B
USA Germany (173 mi)
2019 ‘Scope d:
Terrence Malick
…For 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.
―Middlemarch, A Study
of Provincial Life by George Eliot, the pen name for Mary Anne Evans,1872
At heart, a simple love story, set in the majestic
mountainous region of St. Radegund, Austria (50 km north of Salzburg), not far
from the German border, with the breathtaking beauty of the Bavarian Alps
looming in the distance, though actually shot closer to Italy in Seis
am Schlern. Winner of the François
Chalais Award at Cannes which recognizes the value of journalism, this is the
first Malick film since THE THIN RED LINE (1998) to be shot by someone other
than Emmanuel Lubezki, choosing to use his longtime Steadicam operator Jörg
Widmer as the cinematographer in Malick’s first all-digital film, where the
natural world imposes its constant presence throughout, offering a glimpse of
the eternal for the surrounding farmlands set in isolated rural areas, where
the ominous presence of Hitler and the Third Reich elevates the moral quandary
for one farmer, Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl) and his wife Fani (Valerie
Pachner), as Franz is a deeply devout Catholic who is largely disturbed by the
evils inherent with the Nazi’s, invading other countries, preying on the weak, killing
innocent people, refusing to take the Hitler oath of allegiance required of all
conscripted soldiers, becoming ostracized by the Church and community, viewed
as a traitor, even remembered that way for decades afterwards, where the film
examines his role as a social outsider and the accompanying small-town
persecution that leads to prison, eventually tried in Berlin, where his moral
choice to defy evil is simply not tolerated by the Nazi regime, instead condemning
him to death at the age of 36, an act of courage in a largely unremembered act
of defiance. In its religious context,
the film is a mirror image of Scorsese’s Silence
(2016), which painfully examines the persecution of those first missionaries
bringing Catholicism to 16th century Japan, where the treatment of
outsiders in both cases is nearly identical, leading to a hellish existence in
prison before being sadistically put to death, crucified in Japan, guillotined
in Germany. Jägerstätter’s fate was revealed
by American sociologist and Catholic pacifist Gordon Zahn in his 1964 biography
In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death
of Franz Jägerstätter, while Thomas Merton devoted a chapter to
Jägerstätter in his 1968 book Faith and
Violence, both struck that a person of such humble origins would commit
such an overtly rebellious act, never belonging to any political organization,
leading to a crisis of faith for one man alone, resembling the wider known Joan
Of Arc story, leading to the nullification of his sentence in 1997, while he
was declared a martyr and beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007. There is a documentary film on the subject
entitled FRANZ JÄGERSTÄTTER: A MAN OF CONSCIENCE (2009), while the film itself
was inspired by Franz Jägerstätter:
Letters and Writings from Prison, edited in 2009 by Jägerstätter biographer
Erna Putz, demonstrating how a single act of moral courage has powerful ramifications. It should be noted that Jägerstätter was
emboldened by the actions of Austrian priest Franz
Reinisch who similarly refused to swear allegiance to Hitler and was
executed a year earlier, and also Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and
anti-Nazi dissident who was sent to concentration camps (briefly overlapping
with Jägerstätter’s imprisonment) and hanged near the end of the war.
While the story is compelling, made all the more dramatic by
the splendor of the natural world, revealed as the essence of simplicity,
farmers struggling to survive, working together in harmony, reminiscent of the
spellbinding beauty of Dovzhenko’s EARTH (1930), creating an idyllic portrait
of collectivization, men and women, where all are viewed on equal footing,
opening with the sacred music of Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, Bach Matthäuspassion -
Thomanerchor "Kommt ... - YouTube (7:36), which follows Christ’s
journey to the cross, foreshadowing what’s to come. Equally as enthralling as the lush, visual
power is James Newton Howard’s magical score, A HIDDEN LIFE
(2019) SOUNDTRACK || 01. A Hidden Life. YouTube (2:50), which draws viewers
into the interior realm, becoming a recurring leitmotif for the love story
between Franz and Fani, happily married with three small girls running freely
across the landscape, living a kind of idyllic Edenesque existence in the rural
valleys of an elevated Alpine region, where hard work is synonymous with
cultural pride, with neighbors routinely lending a helpful hand, offering
greetings whenever they pass on the road.
Franz confesses, “I thought that we could build our nest high up in the
trees — fly away like birds,” with Fani answering, “How simple life was then …
it seemed no trouble could reach our valley.
We lived high above the clouds.” Yet
there is ominous opening archival footage of Hitler in front of teeming throngs
from Leni Riefenstahl’s epic propaganda film TRIUMPH OF THE WILL (1935),
alerting viewers to the coming storm, revealing a paradise lost, where this
film shows no war footage, no tanks, no bullets, no blood, no sign of Jews, no
Holocaust camps, only the ravings of fanatics and Nazi prison guards (screaming
in German which Malick chooses not to subtitle), with repeated views of
enlarged swastikas decorating courtrooms or emblazoned on Nazi uniforms. Everything is toned down, emblematic of the
hardscrabble life in this particular rural village, while the natural world in
all its glory frames every perfectly composed shot. It’s an assault to the senses and a visual
treat, where especially powerful are the opening and closing 30-minutes, using
voiceovers to ask ponderous questions, offering internalized philosophical
musings throughout the film which have become a staple of Malick films since THE
THIN RED LINE (1998). Stylistically, the
overall beauty is utterly sensational and sublime, but these continuous
voiceovers are growing repetitive, even when elevated to conversations with
God, as viewers have spent hours listening to this kind of thing before, pondering
the spiritual realms, so when asked to do it once again it grows endlessly
tiresome, particularly in this overlong format, the longest film in Malick’s
career, where it’s becoming clearer over time that Malick needs a different
editing style, spending three years painstakingly editing this film, but it
feels bloated, overstuffed, and excessive, unable to excise extraneous
material, falling in love with every shot.
While it’s easy to be raptured by the grandiosity, it’s harder still for
this director to let go of anything, structurally creating museum pieces of
unearthly beauty, but lacking the earthly passion to go along with it.
In reviewing Malick’s voiceover style, it worked when it was
introduced in THE THIN RED LINE (1998), with the director reimagining the
American Army’s landing on Guadalcanal in 1942, with the title describing a
psychological madness that envelops in the midst of a battlefield onslaught,
witnessing wave after wave of human slaughter, filled with a steady stream of
voices, as if speaking from the dead, paying reverent homage to all who have
crossed that mysterious line in a cinematic requiem for the wounded and the
dead, revealing an elegiac sorrow, a haunting, eternal sadness from the endless
stream of voices silenced through time immemorial. It works again magnificently in 2011
Top Ten Films of the Year #1 The Tree of Life largely because of its epic
and ambitious scale, a film that asks the existential question, “Where do I
come from?” Filled with philosophical
inquiries ruminating on the meaning of life, the perpetual search for meaning
adds a deeply probing curiosity about our very existence, where the film
becomes a ponderous inquiry into how it all began, expressed through tiny
moments in people’s lives, by their collective memories which bond them
together as families, something they uniquely share with one another, filling the
screen with ordinary moments, as Malick examines the essential nature of
love. If we add this film to those
earlier two, it is the weakest effort, as it is biblically inspired and the
most explicitly religious, and the seventh film in a row using a continuous
stream of voiceovers, which makes it harder to identify with, as we’ve
repeatedly experienced this style before and it comes during a serious decline
of religious affiliation, with fewer people defined by their faith, and even
fewer that still attend church (How
America Lost Its Religion - The Atlantic). Arguably the sex abuse scandal among priests
has played a prominent role in declining numbers, but fewer people overall feel
a connection to the church. So films
that seriously examine the meaning of faith, like this one or Scorsese’s Silence, each
one glorifying sadistic torment and personal suffering (with Jägerstätter a
stand-in for Christ), where reveling in agony is a test of faith, many may be
less than overwhelmed by the profundity of it all, where the historical
connection certainly opens eyes, but the religious question may find fewer who
share that devotional curiosity (Get ready, as Malick’s next project is a Jesus
movie entitled The Last Planet). Malick never mentions how the church changed
their views towards Jägerstätter’s sentence 50 years after the fact. Inspired by true stories, acts of heroism
deserve our recognition, but it is not inconceivable that Jägerstätter might be
equally condemned by society today for far less radical views, as xenophobia
alone stirs the ranks of resentment, with neighbor turning against neighbor in
the flick of an eye, where the recent Slovakian film by Marko Škop, Let
There Be Light (Nech je Svetlo), does an excellent job exposing how current
political atrocities and age-old bigotry are financed and promulgated by the
church, especially in rural communities like the one depicted in the film. By emphasizing one man’s noble struggle to
affirm his faith amidst the chaos of war, however, Malick neglects the millions
who were exterminated *because* of their faith.
Malick was a philosophy major at Harvard, graduating with
honors and distinction, doing graduate work at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar but
left after a disagreement with an advisor, where his first two films, BADLANDS (1973)
and DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978), remain his best, easily his most accessible,
allowing a passage of twenty years before making another film, where his style
changed dramatically, losing any narrative cohesion, exploring themes of
nature, transcendence, and spirituality, using meditative voiceovers to ask
deeply probing philosophical questions, having the effect of unanswered
prayers. Using his films as
philosophical essays, questioning the existence of God or the meaning of
existence, he’s developed a stream-of-conscious style in lieu of dialogue or
character development, becoming more abstract, often losing any plot
whatsoever, which loses much of the dramatic intensity of his earlier
films. While this returns to a linear
narrative, Malick continues his practice of bringing actors back for additional
voiceover recordings, literally shifting the film’s emphasis in the editing
room, becoming something altogether different than what he initially
envisioned, building a film around the exchange of letters between Franz and
Fani. Offering truth to power, the film
emphasizes their humble origins, never resorting to long rhetorical speeches,
which there is a major contrast between the animated Nazi vitriol and the more
detached and impassive manner of Franz, who never actually defends himself but
simply identifies as a conscientious objector and refuses to serve in an unjust
war, drawing a moral line of distinction, always emphasizing his free will,
with others expressing their reactionary disdain. The manner in which he and his family are
treated by the local community is eye raising, as it’s in complete contrast to
the harmony that existed before, examining the wrathful repercussions from his
fellow villagers, the members of the Catholic community, including the local
priest and bishop, as well as pressures within his own family, where questions
are raised that simply have no answers, one of which is directed towards his
community, especially when asked to protect the Fatherland, “Have they
forgotten the face of the true Father?”
This gets at the heart of the picture, as Franz isn’t rebelling so much
as following his conscience, living a God-fearing existence, where he answers
first and foremost to God before any demands of the Führer, who comes across as
a false prophet, a heretic, a leader of blasphemy. Too much of the film is spent with Franz in
prison (in stark contrast to the splendor of the natural world) while Fani
endures the contempt and indifference of the community, where all movement or
action ceases to exist, stuck in a fog or paralysis where time literally stops,
losing all urgency and anything resembling dramatic suspense, with a
predictable outcome that is deciphered in the opening half-hour (though his
final moments are stark and harrowing), as there’s a reason this is set in Nazi
Germany, a worst case scenario, the grandest delusion of the 20th
century, where the smallest act reverberates with greater moral weight than the
thunderous tanks and militarized blitzkriegs of a sadistically obsessed madman
and his all-too-willing followers.
