Kritiken

A Hidden Life creates an oppositional force to these images. Just as Franz’s actions are incalculably diffusive, driving his oppressors into confusion and, hence, thought, so the film shakes the spectator from being a passive receiver into an active thinker.

In this current moment of rampant demagoguery and encroaching political and cultural fascisms, Malick’s message is potent.

Malick demonstrates the same interplay of banal citizenship and banal spirituality that blurs straight thinking and stymies good faith today. No wonder secular critics love it.

A Hidden Life is strange, an uncanny mix of everything that has made Malick’s style recognizable (and maybe, depending on you, infuriating) since The Tree of Life.

It’s painful to discover that “A Hidden Life” is as aridly theoretical and impersonal as its bare-bones description suggests.

It’s one of Malick’s finest films, and one of his most demanding. It clocks in at nearly three hours, moves in a measured way (you could call the pacing “a stroll"), and requires a level of concentration and openness to philosophical conundrums and random moments that most modern films don’t even bother asking for.

The camera is just a little too low, the lens just a little too wide, the silence — punctuated by gently rattling cans — ever so ominous. It’s a subtle layer of meaning over a glimpse of the everyday, and it offers a fine example of the director’s uniquely cinematic ability to take the most unexpected, throwaway moment and give it a new emotional valence.

This, I suppose, is my own argument with this earnest, gorgeous, at times frustrating film. Or perhaps a confession of my intellectual biases, which at least sometimes give priority to historical and political insight over matters of art and spirit. Franz Jägerstätter’s defiance of evil is moving and inspiring, and I wish I understood it better.

For the most part, though, this is a frustratingly inert portrait of unwavering certitude. It’s as if Melville’s “Bartleby, The Scrivener”were actually about Bartleby, the clerk who responds to every request with “I would prefer not to.” There’s no mystery here, no narrator wrestling with the limits of his own generosity and tolerance. Just a lot of stunning scenery and exemplary rectitude.

It’s hard not to feel for Franz and his spiritual struggle, and all too easy to enjoy the flowers, sweaters, sheep and sky shots, but Malick’s prettification of this world is as appalling as is his lack of interest in history.

In St. Radegund, Malick’s approach is nearly as fresh as it was in The New World, genuinely breathtaking at times and evoked through two touching, genuine embodiments by the actors.

There’s no tension in Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life—only virtue, as if that were enough to hold a film together.