Retrospective: A Hidden Life

A Hidden Life is not simply a return to scripted narrative filmmaking for Terrence Malick, but his first substantial engagement with the themes of his earlier work since The Tree of Life. The Thin Red Line is perhaps the most obvious point of comparison with its World War II setting and its focus on sacrifice. Malick, like all great Boomer filmmakers, can't get over World War II. If The Thin Red Line was an attempt to reckon with the psychic and human damage the war unleashed on the battlefield, A Hidden Life focuses on living morally as a civilian under the Third Reich.

The film's protagonist, Franz Jäggerstätter, was an Austrian farmer who lost everything when he refused to swear fealty to Hitler. The immediate benefits to him did not exist: he was reviled by his townsfolk, imprisoned, unable to protect his family from his countrymen, and eventually executed by the Third Reich. He spent his later life like Job on his ash heap, believing against all hope that God might prevail. He stood to gain nothing from his obduracy in this life; he sacrificed everything for people who suffered even more.

What particularly shook me up about A Hidden Life is the familiarity of its supporting cast. Decent people in Jäggerstätter's life ask him to recant his opposition to the Nazis out of fear for their own safety. Other normal people don't just acquiesce after the Anschluss but celebrate it outright. Jäggerstätter is widely condemned not for having principles but for having the temerity to act on them. His wife Fani, after a period of hoping to see her husband survive the ordeal, clings to those principles too. She is not rewarded for it. She suffers, and she suffers more. But better a pauper than a fascist, always. Fascism is temporary; tenderness is forever.