‘A Hidden Life’ is a sublime moral meditation

His whole career, Terrence Malick used film less as a narrative vehicle and more as a meditative device, using stylistic elements that either delight or confound, depending on one’s patience and perception. “A Hidden Life” is the new plus ultra Malick film. Practically speaking, it’s three hours of wind blowing through tall grasses as floating voiceover narration ponders the nature of existence. If “The Tree of Life” (2011) felt insufferable, “A Hidden Life” won’t convert you into a believer. It is technique beyond parody

And it is sublime.

“A Hidden Life” is a profound moral and spiritual meditation, one that poses philosophical questions we have asked as long as we have had the words to do so: Why do the right thing if it changes nothing? What is the val

ue of an unwitnessed sacrifice? Is one’s spiritual purity worth the suffering of another?

Malick doesn’t need to answer those questions outright to make us feel the answers deep in our bones by the time the screen cuts to black with the George Eliot quote from which the film gets its title: “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Malick’s hidden life is Franz Jägerstätter’s (August Diehl), a real-life Austrian peasant farmer. He tends his square of earth with his wife Fani (Valerie Pachner), elderly mother and three young daughters. His village is a place of overwhelming beauty, nestled in the shadows of towering, snow-capped mountains shrouded in mist, green hills rolling to distant horizons. It’s a place halfway to heaven. But it’s 1939, and there is no corner of Europe – no pocket of heaven on earth, even – that the Nazis won’t stain with their rot.

Like so many Austrian men, Franz is called into active duty to fight in WWII. It’s a war he doesn’t believe in, barbarism for a cause he finds abhorrent. But even to be a medic would require Franz to swear an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler,

an act his abiding faith will not permit.

Though Franz remains far from the frontlines, conscientious objection is its own sort of battle, one between the human spirit and outside forces that seek to subjugate it. The once-idyllic Austrian village now a spittle-flecked madhouse of anti-immigrant fervor, and Franz’s abnegation calls down scorn and condemnation upon his family.

Diehl and Pachner play their characters with Christ-and-Mary dignity in suffering, expressing in pain-wracked faces what could never be conveyed in words as Franz is subjected to every humiliation and degradation to extract an oath. That suffering would be empty without the love that prefaces it, and there Diehl and Pachner also make

Franz and Frani shine as two bright souls entwined. The score, too, is a gift, some of the best work of prolific veteran composer James Newton Howard’s career; it devastates and elevates in equal measure, priming one for tears and healing after they fall.

“Don’t they know evil when they see it?” It’s a child’s question that still needs asking, in a world that even now harbors Nazis. But the human hearts that flagged and let evil reign are the same capable of art like this – art that comprehends so clearly our most fundamental moral test and pays tribute to one who passed it.

“A Hidden Life” is less a story than an experience, a spiritual journey made accessible. Malick doesn’t transcend cinema. He sanctifies it.