Terrence Malick’s “A Hidden Life” resides above the clouds in a small Alpine hamlet.
Franz Jagerstatter lives there, in Austria, with his wife, Franziska, and their young daughters. They spend their days working and playing in the hillside fields, enraptured by their humble mountain idyll. The enormous peaks that surround them make a kind of open-air cathedral.
The Nazis don’t arrive all at once. Hitler’s rise at first seems very distant. But hateful, anti-immigrant Third Reich ideology begins to seep into the villagers. Angry words can be overheard in the town’s square and, eventually, all are conscripted into the Nazi army. Jagerstatter (played by August Diehl) is the only one not willing to go along and pledge himself to Hitler.
“A Hidden Life” is based on a true story. Jagerstatter was a conscientious objector during World War II whose little-known story has gradually risen in prominence in the decades since Pope Benedict XVI beatified him in 2007.
