"A Hidden Life" Challenges All of Us to Take Action
I've seen A HIDDEN LIFE twice now. I'm a Terrence Malick partisan, but even before 2020, the film was a rapturous antidote to the narratives of empire.
Underneath pastoral settings and pace, A HIDDEN LIFE bristles with contextual and contemporary urgency.
And now more than ever.
I read several A HIDDEN LIFE reviews beforehand, and more than a couple prominent critics, while not hating it, still took pointed issue with perceived lack of insight into Franz Jägerstätter's motivation for refusing loyalty to Hitler.
These responses are both baffling and telling.
Baffling: The first 75+ minutes of A HIDDEN LIFE are rife with visual cues and conversation that ground Jägerstätter's anti-fascist commitment contra the Third Reich and his resistance to warmongering in general:
His work is cultivating life. His family. His Christian faith.
“Do they not know evil when they see it?”
-just one of the many powerful lines from
A Hidden Life
The examples are too numerous to name on here, but I think of sympathetic neighbors who ask of their fellow Austrians, "Do they not know evil when they see it?" Or how Franz is bodily compelled to stop and look when passing a crucified Christ on the road.
Most striking (to me) in A HIDDEN LIFE is Franz's time with an elderly man refurbishing the religious art in the church. Here the film underscores centuries of context for why majority choose allegiance/passivity when fascism officially tests imperative to love neighbor/wage peace.
The church artist laments his own cowardice. He knows what Jesus lived and died for, but won't risk livelihood by straying from depicting a "comfortable Christ." Franz knows who the living Christ is for him and humanity, and to claim him with any seriousness lays claim on our lives.
But in the New York Times, A.O. Scott finds it "frustrating" that the "mystery" of A HIDDEN LIFE, ergo its contemporary "lesson," is absent. He asks, "Why, of all the people in St. Radegund, was he alone willing to defy fascism, to see through its appeal to the core of its immorality?"
And in The New Yorker, Richard Brody uses his review to launch a personal appeal for a moratorium on cinematic Nazi depictions, bemoaning what he sees as a lazy metaphor for evil that extracts no meaning for viewers anymore. But in A HIDDEN LIFE, the events (and Nazis) happened.
I think what these re/viewers find baffling is that A HIDDEN LIFE presupposes and centers a (white) man who knows Hitler is wrong and acts accordingly. Peer pressure and the war machine gets their due, but Franz's conviction and torment is the locus of drama (and historical fact)!
We can very safely assume these re/viewers agree with Franz's conviction in A HIDDEN LIFE, and this is where my bafflement finds their responses telling. Perhaps it's rooted in humility/shame that they know they wouldn't have had the courage to follow through like Jägerstätter.
However, re/viewers don't need a master's degree in Christian theology or the specific Christocentric conviction of Franz to gain the insights Malick clearly offers. What's telling about these responses is where they locate re/viewer presuppositions vis A HIDDEN LIFE.
Because being against Nazis is so “obvious,” viewers agreeing with Jägerstätter's stance should only need to ask themselves why and whether they would have done the same! The film frames Franz's posture clearly. To ask A HIDDEN LIFE for more insight is to presuppose status quo.
So many (white) people like to think they would have actively resisted slavery, marched with King, etc. No, they wouldn't have. We have plentiful living proof. A HIDDEN LIFE knows Franz's act is historically remarkable, even as it gently highlights how “unremarkable” he is.
To ask "why was he so remarkable" stems from a common distancing effort we see when folks want to elevate to “precious” status to a chosen few in order to avoid calling their own bluff on their own ostensible convictions.
No wonder some re/viewers are baffled and feeling bereft. A HIDDEN LIFE isn't interested in putting Franz Jägerstätter on a pedestal and overexplaining his particularity for the sake of deification (though again, the reasons given are clearly mapped).
So many (white) people like to think they would have actively resisted slavery, marched with King, etc. No, they wouldn't have. We have plentiful living proof. A HIDDEN LIFE knows Franz's act is historically remarkable, even as it gently highlights how “unremarkable” he is.
A HIDDEN LIFE asks a much more radical and uncomfortable question: If Franz is this “unremarkable” and yet convincingly does a remarkable thing (in part comparatively so, because so few joined him), then what are you/we waiting for? What are our lives missing, especially now?
Brody also says: "Every shot represents a descriptive line in a screenplay rather than a free observation or a distillation of inner experience; each image checks off predetermined points rather than effecting discoveries."
To which I reply: How telling.
If we find this clearly charted historical biography of man and family resisting Nazis lacking in motive, it only underscores how those discoveries most needing “effecting” are internal — which in turn makes A HIDDEN LIFE that much more valuable an object for wrestling with.
Bountiful ink has been spilled over decades unpacking why so many people "went along" with Naziism, fascist regimes, genocide, war (ahem), etc. What we don't get much of are films like A HIDDEN LIFE that center the kind of person we need more of and all have the power to be.
In this way, A HIDDEN LIFE reminded me of THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (one of my faves). Though many of us grew up on FullyGod-FullyMan doctrine, if we're honest the “man” part always gets subsumed under the God part when it's not wielded to underscore it.
Scorsese's film positions and presupposes Jesus as human first and in so doing takes the call of the living God and the claims it lays on us that much more seriously and therefore exhilaratingly. The life-giving way of Jesus is feels navigated in real time, bodily and urgently.
It's telling that THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST saw throngs protesting it in the streets before it was even released. We want that “comfortable Christ” to give us a back rub when we're on the sin-grace hamster wheel, not one who threatens empire by loving the “wrong” crowd.
Similarly, we want Jägerstätter "better explained" to us so that we can keep him "apart." Special. And he was. But only in part, because more didn't join him, even if they agreed with him. There lies the challenge: What's stopping us, now (not just Austrians then) from joining?
Here it's personal: I/we experienced the exact same in Summer 2017 in Charlottesville. Pastors who love to quote King 51 weeks of the year sounded like the eight Alabama clergymen when the Nazis actually came to town and the stakes couldn't have been higher.
When the Klan & ‘Unite the Right’ made their plans to terrorize Charlottesville in summer 2017, the majority of ‘progressive’ faith leaders here - & all the white male senior pastors - responded w/ vapid pieties & prayer, learned helplessness/deferring to cops/city, & horseshit.
In sum, to find A HIDDEN LIFE lacking in core “answers” is to willfully miss point and distance oneself from the participation Malick seeks in letting this story wash through us. We are asked for an un/remarkable perspective shift, so we might be similarly shaken and convicted.
A HIDDEN LIFE asks us, here and now, to embody the remarkable until it becomes unremarkable. To pray with our feet. To know our “why” when fascism is at the gate and what we're going to do about it. And to build the muscles we need, spiritual and physical, to live out our conviction.
Ask not what makes him special. Ask instead why we don't join in when we know it's right.
As @JeffReichert9 @reverse_shot says: "To find Franz’s dissent enigmatic is to let oneself be limited by the bounds of conventional dramaturgical rules and to ignore the plethora of visual evidence Malick supplies to clarify why it is impossible for Franz to act in any other way."
From @reverse_shot: "A courageous moral act need not be immediately efficacious to produce meaningful impact. Franz’s calm certitude in his decision, arrived at through faith, personal reflection, & individual experience, poses a challenge to all those around him ...
A HIDDEN LIFE and Franz's actions/conviction are "a challenge to all those around him [us], especially those who’ve decided for various reasons to align themselves with the forces of nationalism." - @JeffReichert9 @reverse_shot
In the end, we see fruits of Franz's action in the lives of his neighbors and loved ones. There's repentance, mourning, and new life cultivated.
Ask not what makes him special. Ask instead why we don't join in when we know it's right.
Be transformed. Then bear fruit.