A Hidden Life Review: Terrence Malick as a Product
The subject matter of A Hidden Life, based on a true story, demands seriousness. An Austrian farmer, Franz, is called to fight on the side of the Nazis during World War II, but he refuses to pledge allegiance to Adolf Hitler. Franz is then imprisoned and eventually executed. Throughout the film, director Terrence Malick focuses on the spiritual component of Franz’s life that compels him to carry on. But even as a Christian, I found myself silently begging for Franz’s death during the final hour of the nearly three-hour movie, primarily to escape from the profound boredom I faced.
My disrespectful wish for the Nazis to hurry up and kill Franz represented a dramatic shift from the awe I felt during earlier scenes when Malick’s sweeping camera fetishized the uneven ground and rich vegetation of Franz’s mountainous village home. That same active camera, which moves in odd ways as if to suggest the perspective of a wandering spirit, also achieves a similar but more negative intoxicating effect when it depicts Nazi Germany’s faithful citizens chastising, intimidating, and threatening Franz and his wife Franziska, regardless of the setting. The cinematography captures beauty and ugliness with equal power.
And yet I got tired of it. Perhaps I wouldn’t have if A Hidden Life had been my first experience watching Malick at work. But if one has seen the montage and movement in Malick’s other 2010s films, from The Tree of Life to Song to Song, one can’t help but notice that Malick is a bit like the Australian rock band AC/DC: unchanging (minus the fun riffs and double entendre, of course).
A Hidden Life presents a dilemma: how can a film this personal and heartfelt appear unessential and tedious by its end? I go back to its subject matter. The crude truth is A Hidden Life seems like yet another episode of cinematic Nazis doing horrible things to people, only this time the torture is in Malick’s unmistakable style. Yes, the film highlights a historical outlier in Franz, but Mel Gibson’s conscientious objector in 2016’s Hacksaw Ridge comes across as a more three-dimensional and thus interesting person. Despite being more straightforward than most of Malick’s filmography, A Hidden Life still attempts to be abstract. You’re not watching traditional scenes so much as creative editing that frequently defies time and reason. And so Franz’s spirituality is more like a concept than a characteristic.
Malick is not unlike Wes Anderson, who has been shooting films the same way for so long that you get stuff like The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is well executed but predictable with how it’s shot. It’s true that you can also, with ease, recognize the work of legendary American masters such as Orson Welles, John Ford, and Robert Altman, but those directors tended to mix things up more from both a visual and thematic standpoint. A Hidden Life may bring attention to a rare man who defied the philosophy of the Nazis while in their grasp, but it is a typical outing from Malick.
