[VIFF 2019] REVIEW: 'A Hidden Life' is so pretty you forget there's a story
August Diehl and Valerie Pachner in A Hidden Life, directed by Terrence Malick.
Loyal followers of Terrence Malick will really enjoy the lush forage and big mountains A Hidden Life has to offer, but its narrative moments are so sparse it’s easy to get lost. Sometimes he does that on purpose, but a promise to have more “structured filmmaking” in this three-hour meditation isn’t followed through. Like so many of his other films, A Hidden Life spent years in the editing room. The result is a beautiful Malickian film about love, meaning and devotion during a chaotic time when allegiances often shift, told with typical Malickian touches: narration in whispers, musings while looking at the sky and looong stretches of nature and village people doing everyday things with their hands.
August Diehl plays Franz Jägerstätter, a conscientious objector who refused to fight for the Third Reich. Based on a true story, Franz is a simple farmer married to a devoted wife, Franziska (an awesome Valerie Pachner), living the simple life with his three young daughters in St. Radegund, Austria. Covering the years from the German invasion in 1940 to the tail end of the war in 1943, Franz steadfastly refuses to serve, and in doing so begins to alienate and anger the residents of his tiny village. Franz and Franziska are subject to both physical and verbal abuse even after Franz is conscripted in 1943, though he is sent to prison after refusing to take the Nazi oath.
Spoken mostly in accented English but with streams of German spoken emphatically enough to deduce its meaning without the help of any subtitles, it is an atypical war film with no scenes of battle or military. In the hands of a more mainstream director, this subject matter becomes a traditional love story about two lovers being forced apart and learning how to live independent of each other. Much of their feelings and thoughts are narrated through letters they’ve written to each other, and what scenes Diehl and Pachner have together are both heart wrenching and heartwarming.
Visually, A Hidden Life puts Malick’s talents on full display. The mountains and waterfalls are huge and shrouded in mist, and you could’ve mistaken this for an episode of BBC’s Blue Planet. There’s always a lot of texture and natural light in his shots, and they all look great from every angle because Malick literally shoots from every single angle.
It is also the rare film in which he’s not accompanied by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki; in his place is Jörg Widmer, a lesser known cinematographer but obviously familiar with Malick’s work as a crewmember on The Tree of Life. The soundtrack by James Newton Howard, their first film collaboration together, is astounding and worth the price of admission alone.
The main criticism – like all the other Malick films -- is its length. In the right mood A Hidden Life can be a truly enjoyable watch, but it’s about a half-hour to one hour too long to hold your attention span with such a thin narrative, though it will certainly be Malick’s most well-received since The Tree of Life. One of the effects that he can have on his audience is to render them speechless with both awe and boredom, so those who find the story moving far too slow will find wonder in the mountains.
It’s pretty amazing that Malick can consistently do this. His results have varied, but no other director has been able to employ the devices he uses to such great effect. It looks great and sounds great but it needed just a little depth in story.
A Hidden Life gets three stars out of four.
