I didn’t put any of Terrence Malick’s films on my list of, but I did mention him as one of the decade’s best directors. The run of movies that he’s made in the past ten years—“,” “,” “,” and “”—is, in effect, a single movie, ranging over the places and experiences of his life and linking them to a grand metaphysical design. He is, moreover, one of the few filmmakers—ever—to realize a style that matches such a transcendent goal. Yet, when I heard that the subject of Malick’s new film, “A Hidden Life,” would be the story of an Austrian soldier who refuses to fight on behalf of Nazi Germany, I worried. Malick’s recent string of glories focusses on places that he knows well and at first hand. He has spent plenty of time in Texas, France, and Hollywood, but he has, of course, never been to Nazi Germany. Even so, I walked into “A Hidden Life” buoyed by confidence in the impulses and intuitions of such a great director.

Franz and Fani are seen romping through the fields of Radegund, like blissfully ignorant children, until the lightning bolt of the military draft strikes their household, in 1940, two years after the Anschluss and seven years after Hitler came to power. It’s as if politics and its cultural and local correlates had never existed in Austria. The townspeople appear to have been living like Rousseauian innocents, in a state of natural nobility tinged by a golden drop of Catholicism—happy, safe, and holy. Their village is a hermetic, apolitical, and utterly pre-modern agrarian paradise. The first sign of trouble, ludicrously, is the sound of an airplane overhead, which makes Fani tilt her head upward in bewilderment.Meanwhile, the village’s committed Nazi mayor (Karl Markovics) drunkenly rails against “outsiders” and “immigrants”—but did he and his hatreds suddenly come from nowhere?

Were turbulent, and the Anschluss happened in 1938, yet it seems that politics didn’t penetrate the village’s rustic fabric until the draft snapped up Franz, in 1940—and, even then, he takes his conscription and training as a sort of summer-camp game (though he is conspicuously alone among recruits in not applauding a newsreel of German military victories). Returning home, Franz worries about the possibility of being called to active duty; he refuses to say “Heil Hitler” to passersby. (His response of “Pfui Hitler” gets him into trouble.) Then, in 1943, he is asked to report to the barracks for active duty; that’s when he refuses to swear the oath to Hitler. The entire movie seems designed to illustrate a thesis, one that’s explicitly stated in the film, albeit inversely. “A Hidden Life” is designed solely to contradict the warning of Nazi officials that Franz’s resistance is futile, not only because he’ll be executed but because his sacrifice will be forgotten and remain unknown and without effect or influence.

By the very fact of making the film, Malick both remembers the story and calls it to viewers’ minds—though he isn’t the single-handed recoverer of an otherwise-lost historical event. The letters between the real-life Franz and Fani have survived and have been published, and they provide the basis for the film (as well as the texts for some of its voice-overs). Malick is transmitting a story of which powerful documentary traces remain. What’s missing from his depiction of Franz’s resistance is literally the documentary aspect, the element of the story that connects it directly to Malick’s first-person obsessions.It is Malick’s extreme and original approach, in his past decade of work, to experience and observation that has led to his furiously lyrical transcendental style.

The present-tense-based dramatizations that, when they involve Malick’s own life and his own places, people, and activities, have been so comprehensively challenging, prove, in “A Hidden Life,” vague, impersonal, and complacent. Malick has turned his own idiosyncratic manner into a commonplace, a convention, a habit. There’s one moment in which Malick declares something like an artistic purpose—a scene in which an artist painting scenes from the life of Christ on the walls of the local church complains to Franz of his own inadequate work as a painter of consolation rather than of torment, of reverence rather than of sacrifice. (The artist also alludes to the vain confidence of parishioners that they’d have stood with Jesus rather than with his persecutors—a line that hits Franz like a challenge.) Malick stands on both sides of the equation: he offers images of earthly rapture, suggesting the virtual paradise given to humanity, and he also offers images of torment and agony, suggesting the spoliation, through sin, with which humanity has besmirched that paradise.

It may not surprise you to learn that “A Hidden Life,” the new film written and directed by Terrence Malick, begins with a voiceover over a black screen. “I thought that we could build our nest high up,” a man intones in a near-whisper, “like birds, in the mountains.” What comes next, though, is surprising: an image of flight that has nothing to do with birds. A German warplane soars above the clouds, then dips low enough to cast a shadow over a city where a march is in progress. We are watching 1930s propaganda footage of a Nazi rally, complete with a shot of Hitler taking the stage, rigid and unsmiling even before a triumphant crowd.This is not, to say the least, your typical Malick opener. Within moments he will revert to form, enfolding the audience in a lush cinematic pastoral, set to the keening strings of a gorgeous James Newton Howard score. Here, in the Austrian farming village of St.

Radegund, are the expected vistas of astonishing natural beauty, the misty mountains and waterfalls towering over a secluded 20th century Eden. Here too are a latter-day Adam and Eve, a married couple named Franz and Fani (August Diehl and Valerie Pachner), sharpening their scythes, tending their livestock and clinging to each other and their young children in an affecting pantomime of domestic harmony.But another plane will soon fly over St. Radegund, drawing Fani’s troubled gaze skyward before the first of many ominous fades to black. Sometime later, in 1940, Franz will be called up for military training, separating him for a spell from his family.

But unlike his fellow soldiers, Franz goes about his duties with little enthusiasm and a growing sense of doubt. When he returns home, he and Fani embrace each other so forcefully that they tumble into the grass — a blissful reunion that both will cling to as they silently join forces against the fascist tide sweeping across their country. ‘A Hidden Life’ is a poem and a polemic, an exploratory independent drama and a varnished Hollywood epic, a bold, even visionary work that is not without its compromises.In time, Franz is called up for military service and, after some argument with Fani and others, decides to report for duty so that he can declare his refusal to fight for the Nazi cause.

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A Hidden Life. PG-13 2019 2h 54m. (22)22 Reviews. A Hidden Life, Movie on DVD, Drama Movies, Romance. A Hidden Life’s dialogue relies largely on voiceovers from letters Franciska and Franz exchange while Franz is away from St. The letters begin with a grand “Dear Wife,” and the.

His rationale is clear and simple — “We have to stand up to evil,” he says — and from there, “A Hidden Life” proceeds to show, with painful attenuation, the consequences of such a moral stand. What we see could easily be mistaken for a documentary on wartime incarceration, so attentively does Malick re-create the ambiance of the prison yard where Franz plays games with his fellow inmates, or the cell where he is taunted and tortured by a guard. In these passages, you begin to feel the tedium of waiting, the unbearable weight of Franz’s long journey to martyrdom, which could be a sign of Malick’s self-indulgence, a testament to his expressive gifts or both. “A Hidden Life” is replete with such contradictions. It’s a poem and a polemic, an exploratory independent drama and a varnished Hollywood epic, a bold, even visionary work that is not without its compromises. For those of us who have long admired Malick, even during his trying recent forays into contemporary ennui ( ), it’s thrilling to see him return to the historical period that gave rise to one of his finest works, “The Thin Red Line,” and emerge with an antiwar narrative that sincerely embodies its subject’s pacifism.

But if “A Hidden Life” is indeed this director’s return to form — his best film since his which it resembles in more than a few respects — it might also be the most frustratingly great movie I’ve seen this year. (Fox Searchlight Pictures)Malick’s aesthetic flourishes — the impeccably focus-pulled tracking shots, the mighty blasts of Bach and Dvorak on the soundtrack — can feel revelatory at times and pro forma at others. In a picture that stretches toward three hours, the notable omission of any mention of the persecution of the Jews smacks not of denialism but of incuriosity, and it feels like a missed opportunity. For all the emotional acuity and transparency of the performances by Diehl and especially Pachner, I blanched at the sound of both actors speaking English — a commercial calculation, perhaps, but one that seems all the more dubious given that the Nazi characters bark at each other in German.But if “A Hidden Life” falls short of sublimity, the troubling, powerful lesson it has to impart — the rarity of real goodness in the face of collective evil — is not so easily diminished. Nor is there any mistaking the gravity and authority of its challenge to the viewer. In one of the most piercing scenes, Franz seeks counsel from a religious artist who mournfully acknowledges how few Christians, himself included, understand what it means to actually follow Jesus, who commanded his followers to lay down their lives out of love.