Magnificent Malick rides again
A Hidden Life (PG, 174 mins) Directed by Terrence Malick Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★★
Franz Jagerstatter was an Austrian farmer. In 1943, after many deferments because of his essential work, producing food, Jagerstatter was called up for service with the German army. Jagerstatter refused, citing his conscientious objection to a war he had come to believe was immoral. He offered to serve as a paramedic, but was ignored.
A Hidden Life is the story of the events and the conversations that led to Jagerstatter’s refusal to fight. And of everything that came after.
As imagined and filmed by Terrence Malick, A Hidden Life isa vast and meditative biopic that moves well beyond the confines of the story it is ostensibly here to tell – and out, somewhere, into a consideration of all human life, its predicaments and permutations.
Malick debuted in 1973 with Badlands, and followed up in 1978 with Days of Heaven. Both are stone-cold classics. It is perfectly acceptable to admit, in hushed tones, that maybe you think they are still Malick’s best work. Both films come in around the 95-minute mark.
Malick stepped away from directing for two decades, returning in 1998 with hugely acclaimed and ambitious The Thin Red Line, then The New World and The Tree of Life in 2005 and 2011. All give three hours a serious nudge.
To call A Hidden Life a ‘‘masterpiece’’ is redundant. It is a Malick film, with the philosophising on transcendence, maddening ellipticality and running-time that now implies, all present and correct. I was reminded at times – especially in the scenes of Jagerstatter’s meetings with a priest – of Steve McQueen’s excoriating debut feature Hunger, with a then little-known Michael Fassbender playing the doomed Irish hunger striker, Bobby Sands. A Hidden Life might have benefited from some of that film’s tension and compression. Other moments in A Hidden Life, all black velvet curtains pulling back to reveal the shadowy spaces where the guillotine might lurk, are a testament to the sheer theatricality of the threat of the death sentence and its use as a tool of social control in the hands of dictators and their minions.
As nearly always with Malick, I adored it. While wondering what audiences he might reach and how much more accessible he might be if he curbed the privilege his undoubted seniority and status lends him and aimed to make a two-hour film or less, as he once did.