Real American arthouse: The brilliance and beauty of Malick’s ‘A Hidden Life’

In a season when Scorsese’s extra-long, extra-dramatic, CGI-tainted Irishman is the foremost topic of conversation among U.S. cinephiles, it has been both reassuring and instructive to see an epic-length American film that is both “smaller than life” and possessed of a singular poetry. Terrence Malick — he who endlessly frustrates the folk who want simple, linear, multiplex-safe narratives — proves he is “as tough as Bresson” (Scorsese’s own stated goal, which he hasn’t come near since the Eighties) with his latest, visually sumptuous film that concerns a moral dilemma and has a foregone conclusion.

Both Malick and Scorsese are products of the sublime “maverick” era in early Seventies American cinema. Scorsese has since reinvented himself as a new-model “Arthouse Lite” version of the old Hollywood studio system director. As he has grown older, Malick has becomes even more of a maverick, making lengthy features that have generally eschewed linear plotlines for an assemblage of striking images and slices of life that convey a mood and a rhythm rather than a storyline in the standard Spielberg/Tom Hanks/Marvel mode.

Malick (right) is as different in his approach and goals from Scorsese as he is from David Lynch (with whom he has shared a common production designer, Jack Fisk). Even though his films are lengthy, they are indeed smaller than life, in that he favors character, behavior, and setting over plot. His work draws on the avant-garde American tradition, foreign cinema (Tarkovsky, among others), and a knowledge of both fine art and philosophy (he worked as a philosophy prof before becoming a filmmaker) to offer a collage of elements that conveys characters’ inner lives, while showing them moving toward often melancholy conclusions.

His latest feature, A Hidden Life, is his first film since The New World (2005) to have a linear plotline — perhaps the experimental structures of Knight of Cups (2015) and Song by Song (2017) revealed even to the filmmaker himself the negative aspects of fragmenting characters’ lives too much.

A Hidden Life is the real-life story of Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), an Austrian who refused to sign a loyalty oath to Hitler during WWII. The film is narrated by three characters: Franz, his wife Fani (Valerie Pachner), and his mother (Karin Neuhäuser). It is “a message picture,” but Malick isn’t Stanley Kramer (nor is he Spielberg, an early adapter of “production design cinema”). As a result, the film moves through the plot while also emphasizing moody moments in Franz’s life, and Fani and Franz’s moments of happiness and separation.

Malick has injected Christian themes into his films since The Tree of Life (2011). He is, however, a more subdued Christian than Scorsese, whose recent Silence (2016) and The Irishman (2019) have cringeworthy moments where the Catholic faith is depicted as the one right, unassailable position. For his part, Malick is intent on depicting lowercase “c” Christian behavior more than doctrinaire belief, so here Franz and his wife are seen helping other people while they are being persecuted by the Nazis.

Along these lines, a priest (Michael Nyqvist) is a prominent supporting character. He is on Franz’s side, but he serves as a devil’s advocate as well, asking Franz what he is really achieving by refusing to sign the loyalty oath — the Nazis won’t be affected in the slightest and, most importantly, Franz’s small family (wife, her sister and his mother, and their two children) will be left alone to run the family farm.

The priest’s supremely logical argument is taken up later by Franz’s lawyer and the head of a Nazi tribunal (the superb Bruno Ganz, in his last movie role; above). Franz is reminded that war is about to end shortly and it’s possible to secure him a position as a medic in the Army, so that he is taking no part in Hitler’s destructive activities. Franz holds fast, though, and his moral stance is shown to be a completely private decision (supported by his wife) that is the only path which the headstrong and resolutely moral Franz can take.

Images in Malick’s films are everything — he is a modern American master of dreamlike montage — but here the “forward thrust” of the plot does give a greater importance to the dialogue. In Knight of Cups and Song by Song, the dialogue was poetic but ornamental. At various points here, Franz spells out his beliefs with simple phrases, especially when pressed by the other characters. When he is told that signing the loyalty oath will set him free, he responds with beatific calm, “But I *am* free…”

Malick is indeed so “imagistic” that one can sometimes forget the fine work done by his actors. Diehl is excellent in the lead, conveying Franz’s rigid morality as both a sort of selfishness and a deep caring for others. Neuhäuser is also excellent, as the film is as much Fani’s journey as it is her husband’s.

Hidden Life is not the usual WWII drama. It was ignored by the Oscars for obvious reasons — there’s no conventional uplifting finale, it’s profoundly moral but not preachy a la Spielberg, and it’s not “production design cinema,” of the kind that Scorsese and Tarantino now make. Sympathy for the lead character is not even elicited (as it would be in a Best Picture Oscar-winner) through violence. Malick in fact abstracts the little violence we see through montage and slow motion. American viewers need and want clear cut heroes and villains and things to be outraged about, even in a fictional context. A film about memory and choice rather than suffering isn’t a “satisfactory” WWII story for most audience members.

Malick was recently included in the newly written (in 2018) foreword to Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer by Paul Schrader, who himself proved his work was “as tough as Bresson” in the very Bressonian First Reformed (2017). Schrader labels Malick a practitioner of “dream cinema” in his (Schrader’s) chart of “slow cinema” filmmakers. Malick is in the “Tarkovsky ring” (meaning his films play in theaters, not just at film festivals and at museums) in the “Art Gallery” designation.

Ever the minimalist, Bresson would’ve frowned at Malick’s reliance on professional actors and the length of his films, as well as their intentional non-linearity even in chronological works like Hidden Life. However, Malick is very similar to the French master in his ability to depict — Schrader’s favorite phrase — transcendence. Bresson’s final films ended pessimistically, with little hope for mankind, while Malick (now age 76) has remained a hopeful, upbeat artist. Who thankfully continues in his senior years to craft indelible images and create work that challenges viewers.

Disc-o-rama redux: latest DVD reviews

I have a number of blog posts in “various stages of development,” but I wanted to draw some attention to the DVD reviews I've been doing on a regular basis for the Disc Dish site. I put a lot of work into in to these pieces and am proud of 'em. As always, thanks for reading this blog:

The cult-classic TV series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis: the Complete Series based on the great writings of Max Shulman, and featuring the sublime Tuesday Weld

The beautifully tragicomic Mike Leigh film Life Is Sweet

Frank Zappa: A Token of His Extreme, a 1974 record of my favorite iteration of the Mothers of Invention.

A Hal Hartley double bill on one disc: The Book of Life and the Girl From Monday

The glorious Criterion Collection box saluting the wonderful comedy features of Pierre Etaix

Bresson's classic, suspsenseful prison-escape drama A Man Escaped

Terrence Malick's perfect Badlands

The cinema-verite landmark Chronicle of a Summer

That Cold Day in the Park, the first truly great feature by Funhouse god Robert Altman

The versatile Isabelle Huppert stars in the farce My Worst Nightmare

My favorite Hal Hartley feature, an indie film that gets better and better with age, Trust
 

Method to the Madness of Jerry Lewis, a hagiography of Le Jer

The French drama 17 Girls, based on the real-life case of a group of Massachusetts high school girls who all got pregnant at the same time

More priceless gags and wonderfully odd concept pieces from the Master: The Ernie Kovacs Collection, Volume 2

Pasolini's "erotic" trilogy based on great work of literature, courtesy the Criterion Collection: Pasolini's Trilogy of Life

Memories in the Present Tense: Terrence Malick’s “To the Wonder”

“Life’s a dream,” remarks one character to another in Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, which opens today in theaters. As is this hypnotic film, which functions more as a sensory experience than a conventionally plotted tale of love found and lost. It is not standard multiplex fare, but you can expect nothing less from the filmmaker who last gave us the love-it-or-hate-it masterwork Tree of Life.

To the Wonder is overwhelming in the way few films are these days. Its plotting is minimal, but its visuals are a feast — and not in the green-screen manner of so many contemporary blockbusters. Malick used CGI in Tree of Life, but one can’t imagine him releasing a 3-D film — although his images often feel as if they may burst from the screen.

 

So what is the film’s plot? It concerns an American environmental inspector (Ben Affleck) who falls in love with a Ukrainian woman living in Paris (Olga Kurylenko) and brings her back to his Oklahoma hometown (the real town of Bartlesville). The couple break up, then get back together and begin to seriously wonder about their compatibility. In the meantime, the local priest (Javier Bardem) suffers a crisis of faith as he tends to the poor and sick in his community.

But, as in Tree of Life, the storyline is not the main ingredient here. Malick offers us naked emotions on screen — joy, anger, sorrow, love, betrayal — and the fact that he includes flashback images throughout clearly means the film is meant to function as a series of memories or, more accurately, as a dream.

The exception to this is Bardem’s storyline, which adds a glint of reality to the proceedings. Since his perfect first film Badlands (the new Criterion of which I reviewed recently here), Malick has always had his locations function as “characters” in his films, and here he sketches Bartlesville as a beautiful if lonely suburb — but then Bardem’s plotline explores the “other side of the tracks” where the poor, the disabled, and the addicted live. Jarring images of real residents from the Bartlesvillle vicinity force the viewer to sporadically wake from the “dream” of Affleck and Kurylenko‘s relationship.

From its ornate title onward, To the Wonder is an exercise in disjunction that produces a primal emotional response in the viewer (thus the love-it-or-hate-it status). The visuals are so kinetic and gorgeously composed, and the editing — worked on by no less than five editors — is so fluid that the film creates its own sense of time and space. It is ultimately “about” emotion and memory and what’s left when a romance goes sour.

Malick has both literary and painterly instincts — here his literary side (which leans more towards poetry than fiction) is represented by a nearly nonstop voiceover narration in French by Kurylenko, with Bardem’s character contributing his reflections in Spanish and Affleck supplying a few lines in English. To add to the linguistic stew, out of a clear blue sky (and back into it) Kurylenko befriends a young Italian woman who encourages her to flee Oklahoma, all in Italian.

The voiceover keeps the film from being a silent picture, because although the characters do speak to each other, Malick rarely lets us hear both sides of a conversation — and Affleck and Kurylenko, when heard in fragments of conversation, are both speaking their native languages to each other.

One can readily see an avid fan of multiplex romances tuning out on To the Wonder for all the reasons that fans of arthouse cinema will be drawn to it. The film contains two idyllic-looking Hollywood stars — Affleck and Rachel McAdams — who are utilized for their looks rather than their acting ability. Malick’s films have contained great performances, but they have also contained plenty of actors who are “figures in a landscape.”

Those who want a straightforward love story will be turned off or even irritated by Kurylenko’s sometimes overripe musings in the voiceover narration (“Where are we when we’re there?”) and her character’s childlike giddiness when happy and petulant behavior when mad — but, again, these are “effects” (not fx) that Malick uses in the manner of control-freak filmmakers like Kubrick — a director he’s often compared to — and Bresson and Dreyer.

Those last-mentioned cinematic masters are excellent points of reference here, because Malick injects a note of (Paul Schrader’s term for Bresson, Dreyer, and Ozu) “transcendence” into both plotlines. The lovers are happy and blissful in natural surroundings, but miserable in the closed confines of their house (which always has a bare minimum of furniture — as in both Bresson and Dreyer). In addition to a sequence where Affleck refuses to pray with his temporary lover McAdams (who’s the film only “certain” Christian), we have the Bardem plotline, which plays like a modern, even grimmer take on Père Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest.

Those who liked Tree of Life — I was overwhelmed by it and needed several days to process what I’d seen — will embrace To the Wonder. For those who are uncertain about the new film, just consider the prospect of seeing a true “emotion picture," a work that is visually charged — at times remote in meaning, but exquisite in execution and absolutely wrenching on a visual level.

Jacob Brackman on Terrence Malick

From the Funhouse interview.


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