There are a lot of mountains in Terrence Malick’s new film A Hidden Life. No matter your opinion on the piece as a whole, everyone agrees on that. In the nearly three hours’ running time, you can see enough of the Austrian Alps to save yourself a trip to Europe—so it’s understandable that some viewers might find the setting overdone. At the same time, the endless fields, valleys, streams, and trails all seem to drive home the deep beauty of a world which one man sacrifices as he struggles towards the peak of his life.
Some of the most important words Malick gives us are only shown, not spoken: “This film is based on real events.” A Hidden Life tells the story of Franz Jägerstätter, a farmer from a small town in Austria, who in World War II faced the misery of Hitler’s dictatorship. Jägerstätter’s conscience told him not to take the military oath of allegiance; nearly everyone else told him otherwise, except for his wife and a friend or two. His series of quiet but persistent refusals led him to his execution at the hands of the Nazis in 1943. He left behind a widow and several small daughters, and was beatified by the Catholic Church in 2007.
It takes hours of film time to reach Jägerstätter’s death, reminding us that while many martyrs are called to sacrifice their lives in a sudden and unexpected instant, others know of their immanent martyrdoms for years beforehand. In that way, Jägerstätter’s ascent towards his ultimate sacrifice is like climbing the mountains that surround his hometown: a journey made of slow, careful, agonizing steps, pulling away into the increasing unknown where the air is thinner and the scenery harsher.
We can see this happen as Jägerstätter moves from the vastness of a mountain village to the concrete of Nazi prisons and solitary cells. The film shows the contrast clearly as it switches between scenes of his imprisonment and scenes of his family back at home under the wide sky. Often, when Jägerstätter wanders around in the prison yard with his dead-eyed fellow inmates, he looks up at the blue stretching out above the barbed wire.
Most would consider Jägerstätter’s ordeal a descent into Hell, and that’s certainly not far off. On the other hand, as a devout Catholic, he knows the paradox of the Cross; he knows that even when his senses and natural desires tell him otherwise, his suffering is really an elevation towards the Divine. At the top of this dangerous climb, God is waiting for him.
Nowhere is this idea clearer than in the movie’s climactic scene, which portrays the moments leading up to the execution. Jägerstätter waits in the prison yard. Above him is the open sky, the afternoon sun; past the walls is the freedom he’s given up. One by one, inmates are led into a dark room where the guillotine awaits. Each man’s anxiety shows forth in different ways, and they try to comfort one another somehow. Finally, it’s Jägerstätter’s turn.
As he’s escorted to the door of the room, the camera angle shifts to his perspective: a few final glances at the sky before we go inside, barely able to make out the guillotine through the dim light. With him, we’ve taken a martyr’s last desperate look at the world. The very peak of his struggles, however, comes at the moment where we lose his perspective; no director can follow there. There’s only room on that summit for one man and his God.
There are a lot of mountains in Malick’s film, but they remind us of this one, the most invisible. It’s the mountain a person ascends with his or her own decisions, loves, prayers, desires, and reactions to suffering. For most of us, the bulk of the mountain necessarily remains invisible. For some, however, the peak is reached when our faith in a transcendent God costs us our earthly life, and this is a peak that disappears into the heights of heaven.
Featured image courtesy of Birne1967 via WikiMedia Commons
- Whatever You May Do - May 7, 2020
- Stashed Classics: The Scarlet and the Black - May 7, 2020
- Pilgrim’s Progress: Virtual Mass - April 1, 2020