The antithesis of Jojo Rabbit is easy to find. No film approaches World War II with more dramatically, visually, and structurally opposed intentions than Terrence Malick’s new epic A Hidden Life. In Jojo Rabbit, Hitler is represented by Taika Waititi as a farcical, galumphing buffoon, who tries and fails to impress fifth-grade-level meanness upon the film’s titular character. A Hidden Life gives us glimpses of Hitler through real archival footage—mixed almost convincingly with imitations of it—and the film’s conflict revolves around a man who refuses to salute the Führer. It is impossible to imagine 'heil's' tossed about as casually as 'hello's,' as the stakes are reflected realistically, rather than warped for laughs.
The grainy black-and-white imagery which opens A Hidden Life, surveying party rallies and military spectacles, stands in striking contrast with the resolution of the rest of the film. Jörg Widmer, the director of photography, told IndieWire at Cannes in May that the team had found “lightweight cameras with lenses...which could take a lot of contrast without flaring and with a huge range of latitude.” They used Red’s garishly named Epic Dragons, though I wondered if Widmer knew that the film often looked as though it had been shot with an iPhone, such was the realism and clarity of its composition.
Of course, an iPhone wouldn’t catch a lens flare, nor would its color grading likely hold up when projected onto a bigger screen, but watching A Hidden Life, I felt I had entered a theme park, a lusher version of Colonial Williamsburg, maybe, sans sweet shops or apothecaries. It was as if a reenactment had started up, with more expensive costumes and set detailing.
This “documentary” palette, as Widmer characterizes it, is rare for a period piece, and proves astonishing, even if the viewer misses the warmth and softness that have come to key audiences into historical features. Once the loopholes are closed—enough time passes without a tourist wandering into the village, stray coffee cups remain outside the frame—the landscape of wood panelling and wheat fields thrusts itself upon us. No escape, no breathing room. Which is to say you find yourself breathing in the air of the countryside, or a capital city, tinged by fuel and death.
The plot of the film moves between Sankt Radegund, the Austrian farming community where Franz Jägerstätter lives and works, and Berlin, where he and his wife Franziska must travel, in the fight to defend his status as a conscientious objector. We have entered the final years of the Third Reich. Radegund faces the prejudice of his community when word gets out that he is resisting military recruitment—old friends ignore and throw produce at Franziska; his young children are chased and bullied. Franz does not give in, however. August Diehl, who plays him, pierces the stoicism of obstinacy with the grace of youth. In close-ups, we see what lines exist around Franz’s eyes flinch; he has a family, and he is scared, but he will resist the evil besetting his country, at all costs.
The thematic content in A Hidden Life is better served by Malick’s style than either of his past two films, whose dull arrivals blunted the impact left by The Tree of Life. The meandering in Song to Song and Knight of Cups couldn’t be tolerated because it was too self-pitying, too privileged. Franz and Franziska, on the other hand, share a bond whose grandeur is well supported, by rural isolation, by fear of separation.
The narrated letters the couple sends to each other, which form the main expositional device in the film, are overlaid with some of the most evocative and visceral visual sequences I’ve ever seen. When Franziska writes that one of her and Franz’s daughters asks to leave the door open at night, in case Franz comes home, we see the girls spilling water in the kitchen, sprinting through hallways, embraced by their mother and their aunt, as they were by their father in earlier scenes. I so often felt like an intruder, scared I would slow the momentum.
Malick must have cut down hours of footage, because he doesn’t linger, scarcely giving us time to notice the stitching on Franziska’s religious dress before whisking us to the Tegel prison, where Franz endures mistreatment and receives legal advice. The camera tracks through a hall of cells, and then through an ornate church. Malick places the same conversations in different settings, too, sometimes in adjacent corners of one room, perhaps to speak to the inter-spatial persistence of worry, but also because he probably couldn’t decide between his many wonderfully sun-dappled options.
The question that arises during A Hidden Life, from anger, from heartbreak, is this: who has any right to interrupt the harmony of Franz’s existence? It is interrupted, though; it is violated ruthlessly. The film exists in a cycle of pain fueling beauty fueling pain. But with his surprise static looks at Austrian wilderness, Malick might be reminding us that interruptions are inherently impermanent—the landscape rights itself. My father, a documentarian, would like these shots. They embody an environmentalist’s appreciation, and they read as inversions of indulgence, an auteur-ish pejorative of which Malick is routinely accused.
It is with A Hidden Life that Malick cements himself (if he hadn’t already) as one of modern cinema’s most ardent proponents of storytelling guided by the image, and the image alone. James Newton Howard’s score beguiles but complements; Malick’s script ruminates and thuds. No, watching is what we must do. We must watch the faces of people who struggle and survive, and the world with which they interact, a world at once unforgiving and eternally giving. This process of watching is a commitment—A Hidden Life runs three hours long—but to walk away from the film is to sense a set of memories newly latched onto your consciousness, which you know you did not experience, but only because you keep pinching yourself.
Fergus Campbell is a junior in Columbia College.