A Hidden Life
A HIDDEN LIFE - 20th Century Fox
Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life is a reflective rumination on the consequences of both defiant action and passive inaction while being a visually stunning work that captures divine beauty in nature. Though the film meanders and takes plenty of time to reach its inevitable and dreadful conclusion, what results at the end of the journey is a profoundly human experience, where love tethers the lead couple’s souls to the earth and travels with them into the great beyond and serves as the foundation for the film’s structure. Malick’s work is, at times, painfully slow-moving but rich in vivid detail and has a sense of scale on both a grand and a personal level.
At the centre of this film is the love and correspondence between Franz Jagerstatter (August Diehl) and his wife Franziska Jagerstatter (Valerie Pachner), two farmers whose lives become complicated and forever ill-fated when Franz is called to fight for the Nazis in World War II and refuses to serve a cause he does not believe in. Crucial story movement is delivered primarily in voice-over that vocalizes the letters delivered between the two of them, which is a compelling hook and sets the cold and emotional tone quite well throughout but ultimately, it becomes a weak storytelling device that leads to confusion as to what exactly is happening and wherein the story the characters are. Much of this voice-over is delivered over footage of daily life, offering a glimpse into the blissful lives the characters once led and the pain and suffering that results from Franz’s choices.
A HIDDEN LIFE - 20th Century Fox
Diehl and Pachner deliver quietly soulful performances here and convey much-shared history and deep love for one another through simple gestures of affection and gazes into each other’s eyes. More than anything, their double act grounds the more sweeping and grand aspects of the film to a human level and keeps the slowly-building sense of transcendence and connection to God that Franz is experiencing tethered to some sort of tangible human life. In this way, the film is powerful when it dares to connect with its characters and visually depict their pained emotional and mental state. The camera starts close on their faces and then slowly moves outward into the world, and the cinematography — courtesy of Jorg Widmer — captures the beauty of human life and the importance of connection by sticking as close to the characters as it can.
The film’s main issues are related to pacing and plotting, as it is quite long and slow and edited in a laborious and repetitive manner that does a disservice to the emotions attempting to be expressed in each scene. The film takes its time to pause and reflect as much as it can but the scenes do not have a clear smaller-scale arc, flowing into one another haphazardly and randomly. What results is a disorienting experience that desires to be trimmed down, given more of a sense of structure from scene-to-scene.
A Hidden Life is a bold, moving and sorrowful experience that sings with sympathy for its leads and features masterful technical craftsmanship behind the camera, but it leaves much to be desired in terms of narrative momentum, well-paced storytelling and having a sense of purpose that elevates it beyond the slow and dry nature of its construction.
A HIDDEN LIFE is released in the U.K. January 17th 2020
