What’s immediately striking about Terrence Malick’s newest movie is that its premise does most of the work for him. Malick is known for imprinting a characteristic visual style and spiritual tone on all his stories, regardless of their provenance or theme, thus creating his own theme, which usually centers on the nexus between the natural world and God. A Hidden Life is about the Austrian farmer Franz Jagerstatter (August Diehl), who refused to fight for Adolf Hitler because of his religious beliefs. The first half of the film takes place high in the Austrian Alps, a milieu where nature is king and God’s work is taken for granted. Jagerstatter’s life is so simple that he doesn’t even need the Catholic Church to guide his spirituality (“the Church tells you so…”), and he comes off as something of an oddity in the community, a man of deep faith without need for dogma to explain how to channel that faith. He sees God in the trees and the fields and the animals and in his love for his wife, Franzi (Valerie Pachner), who gives him three children. As with many such passages in Malick’s films, this idyll is sometimes overwrought, an excess of beautiful scenes beautifully staged and shot. Some will no doubt find it tiring, but it makes Jagerstatter’s idealism whole and uncomplicated, and that’s important because it determines the choices he makes, ones that very few of us ever even contemplate.
Eventually, the Anschluss comes and Jagerstatter is sent off for basic training, which he tolerates with native stoicism. Afterwards, he returns to his village, which has been altered terribly by the scourge of forced patriotism. As Jagerstatter awaits his draft notice, he becomes more than just the village eccentric. His conscience is seen as a danger to the community, and he and his family are ostracized. He is open about his objection to the war, which in and of itself isn’t the real problem. Though conscientious objectors were not permitted in the German army, they could get assigned to non-combat duty. Jagerstatter’s problem is that he won’t pledge loyalty to Hitler, who he sees as the anti-Christ, even if he doesn’t use that exact term. When his notice comes the village is almost relieved to get rid of him, while his wife is frantic: Is your spiritual purity worth the burden you are putting on your family?
The final third, which details Jagerstatter’s stint in prison, is almost all about internals—the insides of jail cells and prison yards, the deep recesses of Jagerstatter’s strangely placid mind. Malick’s intense use of shadows brings out the slippery slope that the lawyers, judges (one of whom is played by Bruno Ganz in his last film appearance), and clergymen who try to get him to tell a white lie to save himself have to navigate in their own lives of self-deceit. What’s almost miraculous about A Hidden Life is that Jagerstatter doesn’t come across as a saint. He’s actually the most patient man you will ever meet; a purposeful, perfect fulfillment of Malick’s vision of the spiritual being as leading man.
In English and German. Opens Feb. 21 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter (050-6868-5001), Shinjuku Cine Qualite (03-3352-5645).
A Hidden Life home page in Japanese.
photo (c) 2019 Twentieth Century Fox Corporation
Justin Kelly’s cinematic retelling of the J.T. LeRoy scandal is the second film I’ve watched in a span of 24 hours about a true-life literary hoax. The day before I watched Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, which was about biographer Lee Israel’s two-year project to defraud literary memorabilia collectors by forging letters by famous dead authors. The Heller film is superior to Kelly’s, but mainly for technical reasons. Heller understands how to shoot and edit for maximum emotional resonance and how cinematic time differs from real time. Kelly’s film, which depicts a longer time period, is often confusing in that incidents almost seem to happen on top of one another. And the use of title cards and voiceovers just add to the mess of developmental tricks that are obviously used to paper over lapses in imagination.
Most bets were on Sam Mendes’s World War I epic to take the Best Picture Oscar at last week’s Academy Awards ceremony, but no one seems to be griping that he was robbed. I guess that most people who saw all of the nominated films probably think that the best one won, but it’s still worth discussing why 1917 was favored in the first place. The thinking is that movies about heavy-duty themes (war) that are also technically challenging (the famous “one take” gambit) have an advantage with Academy voters. Within those narrow parameters, 1917 is quite good and exerts its intended power as you watch it. Afterwards, however, it fails to linger, a function of its gimmick rather than its theme.
The first thing that needs to be said about The Good Liar for those who look to reviews for recommendations is that it’s essentially a straightforward adaptation of what sounds like a trashy thriller novel made respectable by the casting of two of Britain’s finest veteran actors. That description alone should be enough to let you know whether you want to see it, and if it isn’t then probably you shouldn’t, because, as directed by supreme hack Bill Condon, it offers little in the way of surprises or deep thought.
The post-2007 recession will continue to supply movies and TV dramas with endless examples of capitalist venality and the resulting suffering of the masses, but so far there’s been what seems like an even divide between comedy (The Big Short, etc.) and melodrama (99 Homes, etc.). Hustlers, which is based on a true story, is stuck somewhere in the middle in terms of entertainment value. Essentially a feature-long revenge fantasy against the moneyed assholes who caused the meltdown—not to mention moneyed horndogs—the story’s real-life particulars have obviously been ginned up, and for once it’s a good thing.
At this late date there’s little originality to be squeezed from the rind of the classic drawing room murder mystery epitomized by the work of Agatha Christie. Personally, I’ve always found the genre, with its strictly structured setups, carefully dropped red herrings, and over-determined reveals, unsatisfying since with each new story there are necessarily diminishing returns in terms of excitement. More to the point, the structures and sentiments required by the genre leech the stories of anything identifiable. The murder and subsequent investigation might as well be happening in Middle Earth.
When you look at the life of French novelist Romain Gary, there are a lot of incidental notes that could make for fascinating sidetrips by themselves. One is that he is the only French writer to have ever won the Goncourt Prize twice under two different names, which, as it happens, is the only way you can win the Goncourt twice since French law prohibits the same writer winning it more than once. The other incidental I want to know more about is the story behind Gary cowriting the script for The Longest Day, an English language movie that, until Saving Private Ryan, was the most memorable film ever made about D-Day. Gary’s take on the war is especially valuable if you take his memoir, Promise at Dawn, for what it says it is. Personally, I have my doubts, since so much of what happens in the story is almost beyond belief, but maybe that’s just a function of director Eric Barbier’s style of storytelling.
It’s the slightest of serendipities to note that two days after the great Terry Jones died at the age of 77, another Terry who toiled in the same comedy group and, like Jones, a man who made a second career as a director of feature films, finally sees his 30-years-in-the-making epic open in Japan. Granted, Terry Gilliam is surely a more famous filmmaker than Terry Jones, though I would hesitate to call him a more successful one. Jones’ output was slight in comparison, but it was surely more consistent in tone and quality since it mostly had to do with bringing Monty Python’s Flying Circus to the big screen. Does that make Gilliam, a famous asshole with a streak of artistic idiosyncrasy a mile wide, more ambitious? Perhaps, but given that ambition, it will probably be some time before we’re able to properly judge his body of work.
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