
© Global Look Press / ZUMAPRESS / Reiner Bajo
A Hidden Life, Dir: Terrence Malick, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2019
A Hidden Life by Terrence Malick celebrates an Austrian farmer's Christian principled opposition to Hitler, and any attempts to draw a parallel between the movie and anti-Trump resistance are myopic at best.
The new film is the true story of Franz Jagerstatter, a Catholic farmer in Austria who is conscripted into the German Army during WWII and must choose between his conscience, and pledging allegiance to Hitler and the Third Reich.
Jagerstatter's conscientious objections to Nazism come with dire legal consequences that put his life in peril and leave his mother, wife, and three young daughters pariahs in their small village community.
The movie, which stars a who's who of European actors, including August Diehl, Bruno Ganz, Michael Nyqvist, Franz Rogowski, and Mathias Shoenaerts, may be difficult for non-cinephiles to absorb as Malick, who has made such classics as
Badlands,
The Thin Red Line, and
The Tree of Life, has a storytelling style that is more meditative and impressionistic than general audiences may be conditioned to accept. That said, the film is as dramatically profound and insightful as anything I have seen all year.
Although
A Hidden Life was in development before Trump became president,
some out here in Hollywood have interpreted the film as a metaphor for the moral imperative to resist Trump. I think that interpretation is myopic at best, and believe that
the movie is unintentionally a scathing indictment of the moral vacuity and hypocrisy at the heart of the anti-Trump resistance.
The main point I took away from the film is that moral authority is essential if opposition to evil is to endure. Franz Jagerstatter had an abundance of moral authority because
his loyalty was not to country, village, leader, party, policy or even church, but to the truth.
Comment: As above so below: