Three Hours

When the lights came up, someone in the next row asked, "How long was that movie?" Several of us laughed, and a man in that row replied, "It clocked in just under six hours." In fact, "A Hidden Life" runs to three hours. But that is a long time for a movie.

"A Hidden Life" has admirable scenery and handsome people well filmed. It does not tell one much about Franz Jägerstätter. One gathers that he objects to Hitler, that he is not a member of the Nazi party. His grounds of objection to taking an oath of loyalty to Hitler are not really clarified; a twenty-first-century audience will think the point obvious, whether or not the viewer can imagine facing the consequences he did.

John Lukacs gives about five pages to Jägerstätter in an essay collected in Remembered Past. Having read that, I knew as much about Jägerstätter before the film as after. I suppose that some viewers may have learned that he was a Catholic; if so, they wouldn't have got much information on how that shaped his conscience and decisions. I don't think that the reviews in the newpapers gave much context.

Really, my points of complaint are three. First, the movie is perhaps unfair to Jägerstätter's parish priest, who is shown as a temporizer, but who did some jail time in 1941. Second, the quotation from George Eliot shown at the end, on hidden lives that change the world seems to  miss the point--as numerous figures correctly told Jägerstätter in the movie, what he was doing made no difference to the course of history, did not contribute to ending the war a day sooner; the point is that he witnessed to the truth. Third, the story might have been better managed by a director other than Terrence Malick, whose strength seems to be scenery rather than character.