Terrence Malick makes a farmer’s resistance to Hitler deeply affecting by attending to the marriage it endangers. August Diehl and Valerie Pachner hold our attention, even when the film repeats a point we have already understood.
Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life is a moving account of resistance that sometimes takes longer than it needs to. Franz Jägerstätter is an Austrian farmer whose objection to swearing loyalty to Hitler puts his ordinary life under intolerable pressure. The film asks what such a decision costs within a marriage, where a private conviction cannot remain private for long. Across 173 minutes, it keeps returning to the life he wants to continue living with his wife, giving us good reason to care about what happens to them.
Jörg Widmer’s wide-angle images give the fields and mountains an imposing presence, but the useful detail is often a body moving through them. The rhythmic scything matters because we can see the effort involved in maintaining this apparently peaceful life. The camera’s movement makes the rural passages feel inhabited, even when the scenery is being offered for admiration. Sebastian T. Krawinkel’s production design is persuasive in these working spaces: the farm has a purpose beyond providing a pleasing background. We believe that people live and labour here.
August Diehl is convincing as a man who does not consider his conscience negotiable, though the writing gives him relatively little uncertainty to play. Valerie Pachner, as Fani Jägerstätter, makes the marriage feel equal, allowing affection to coexist with the strain of sharing the consequences of someone else’s decision. We were moved by their tenderness amid the farm work, because being accustomed to one another makes the prospect of separation so painful. James Newton Howard’s music is most persuasive here, lending warmth to the shared life that the couple are trying to preserve.
The treatment of church and state gives the film some welcome anger. Franz Jägerstätter takes his faith seriously, yet religious authority offers little support when that faith brings him into conflict with Nazi rule. Terrence Malick does not let the church off for that failure. Nor does he require us to share the farmer’s beliefs: the wish to go on working beside his wife is easy enough to understand.
The difficulty is that the farmer’s steadfastness becomes an excuse for dramatic repetition. Editors Joe Gleason, Sebastian Jones and Rehman Nizar Ali let scenes overlap and return to familiar images until another stretch of questioning adds little to what we already know. There is value in making us sit with an uncomfortable decision, but some passages leave us waiting for the film to move on. August Diehl can suggest resolve without explaining it again, and Terrence Malick too often supplies another explanation anyway. The film has already shown how much the couple stand to lose.
Do not come to it expecting a war film driven by combat. A man declining an oath gives a director no obvious spectacle, and Terrence Malick has the confidence to spend his time on the life that makes the refusal difficult. The farm work deserves the attention, even when the repeated questioning does not. Set aside an uninterrupted evening, with some tolerance for being told something important more than once.
