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Cannes: Terrence Malick’s ‘A Hidden Life’ is a return to form and a spiritual call
to arms
By Justin ChangFilm Critic
7-9 minutes

Times critic Justin Chang is filing regular dispatches from the 72nd annual Cannes
Film Festival, which runs May 14-25 in France.

In the eight years since Terrence Malick won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for “The Tree
of Life,” his magisterial drama about childhood’s end and the spirit’s awakening,
the standard critical line is that he has become an artist lost in the wilderness,
stranded in an artistic limbo of his own making.

His most recent features — “To the Wonder,” “Knight of Cups” and “Song to Song” —
are wispy, fragmentary tales of romantic ennui and moral drift, full of visual
beauty but absent a comparable sense of transcendence. I admired them more than
many of my colleagues did, though it would be disingenuous not to admit that I,
too, was left wondering if this great and singular filmmaker would ever give us
another movie to love.

I wonder no more. Sunday marked Malick’s return to Cannes, and it felt like a
homecoming in more than one sense. His extraordinarily beautiful and wrenching new
movie is called “A Hidden Life,” a title that quotes from “Middlemarch,” though one
that could easily be misinterpreted as a reference to this famously press-shy
auteur himself. But it also sounds an echo of “The Tree of Life,” which may be more
than mere coincidence: If that 2011 film was Malick’s most personal and
autobiographical work, then this one feels like a decisive return to roots. It’s at
once a linear, almost classically structured drama and an exploratory, intensely
romantic work of art.

“A Hidden Life” tells the story of Franz Jägerstätter, a peasant farmer from the
Austrian village of St. Radegund who was imprisoned and executed in 1943 for
refusing to fight for the Nazis. It’s the writer-director’s second World War II
picture, after “The Thin Red Line,” except that here not a single shot is fired.
The focus is entirely on Jägerstätter and his family, his growing discontent as
Austria falls into Adolf Hitler’s grip and his heroic, ultimately fatal decision to
become a conscientious objector.
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August Diehl and Bruno Ganz in the movie “A Hidden Life.”

(Reiner Bajo)

After some brief archival footage of Hitler at the height of his powers, the movie
settles down in St. Radegund, whose rolling green pastures and mist-wreathed
mountains may constitute the most astonishing vision of earthly paradise Malick has
given us, which is saying something.

You will recognize some familiar sights and sounds: the babbling of a brook, the
rustling of wind in the leaves, the orchestral blasts of Bach, Beethoven, Handel
and Dvorak on the soundtrack. And you will settle into the movie with a sigh — or
perhaps a groan, depending on your persuasion — as Malick immerses us in yet
another blissfully idealized evocation of family life.

Pushing plows, threshing wheat and taking care of livestock is hard work, but Franz
(a haunting August Diehl), a man of joy and contentment, also loves chasing and
playing with his wife, Fani (Valerie Pachner) and their three young daughters. But
the family’s deep ties to the land and the surrounding community are disrupted when
their fellow villagers take up the call of “Heil Hitler,” submitting freely to the
grip of a murderous totalitarian regime. When a local bishop urges Franz to submit
as well, he makes a decisive break with the church — though not, crucially, with
God, whom he continually presses and wrestles with in prayer.

I am still wrestling with “A Hidden Life” myself, and imagine I will continue to do
so long after its eventual release. The lengthy middle act, in which Franz finds
himself called up for military duty and imprisoned after refusing to fight, feels
lumbering and oppressive, which may of course be entirely the point; the
claustrophobia here is physical and spiritual. Given the ensemble cast, which
includes the late Bruno Ganz in one of his final roles, I wish that Malick had
simply committed to shooting entirely in German, rather than a mix of German and
English. (A particularly nagging choice: The Nazis are often heard barking in
German, while Franz and Fani’s mellifluous voice-overs are in English.)

But the conviction of this movie would speak forcefully in any language. “A Hidden
Life” is both an intense portrait of Christian devotion in practice and a damning
study in how religious institutions, among others, can align themselves with evil.
Malick sees no contradiction between these two truths; for him, sincere doubt and
serious belief have always gone hand-in-hand. When a character murmurs, “To follow
Him is insanity” — the first and not the last time the movie quietly broke me — you
register fully what it might mean, and cost, to obey a doctrine of peace in violent
times.
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August Diehl in “A Hidden Life.”

(Reiner Bajo)

Malick may be making the same movie he always has: a gorgeously expansive cinematic
poem that is forever carving out fresh emotional tributaries, but which always
cycles back to the despoiling of Eden, the fear of violence and mortality, the calm
acceptance of the unknowable. But if his camera is still given to flurries of
ecstatic movement, it also seems more stationary, more grounded than usual, as if
the director were pausing to gather his thoughts and clear his throat. He has an
awful lot to say.

At its simplest level, “A Hidden Life” exists to disprove the snarling Nazi
soldiers we hear telling Franz that his act of protest is meaningless and that no
one will ever remember him. (They have admittedly already been disproved, thanks to
the scholarship of Gordon Zahn and Thomas Merton, as well as a 2007 papal
declaration of Jägerstätter as a martyr.) But it is also a call for moral vigilance
in any era, the present one very much included: It is hard to watch this movie and
not think of the rise of far-right and nationalist movements across Europe, or the
Trump administration’s chokehold on evangelical Christianity.

That particular charge may be implicit, but it’s also unmistakable. Unless you are
allergic to near-three-hour running times, there is nothing particularly difficult
or elusive about “A Hidden Life,” nothing too cosmically elevated or metaphysically
overreaching, to cite some of the dismissals frequently leveled against this
director’s work. If we understand pretension as an attitude that leaves no room for
humility, then is there any filmmaker working today less pretentious than Terrence
Malick, any artist more generous and unassuming in the way he exalts the beauty of
the everyday?

Just as importantly, in our era of ever-expanding options and decreasing patience,

is there an audience still willing to accept that challenge and see that beauty as
he does? Even when tarnished, Malick’s legend looms large at a festival like
Cannes, where he can be dismissed as a scourge and hailed as a god, but where he
will never elicit an indifferent response. He deserves an equally impassioned
reception when this imperfect, wise and entirely heroic movie comes out of hiding.

justin.chang@latimes.com