Terrence Malick

A Hidden Life (2019)

André Crous

A Hidden Life may have relatively more substance than most of Terrence Malick’s other films, but the director’s immutable style is lazy at best and incongruous at worst.

A Hidden LifeUSA
3*

Director:
Terrence Malick
Screenwriter:
Terrence Malick
Director of Photography:
Jörg Widmer

Running time: 170 minutes

Most of us tell ourselves that we would have stood up for justice if we had lived in Germany under Hitler. While it is true that many Germans at the time were unaware of the full extent of the Jewish genocide, they knew enough. But what if your neighbours and friends also went along to get along, regardless of whether they believed in the Nazis’ hysterical nationalism and ideology of Aryan superiority? At what point would you have resisted the march towards groupthink? At what point would you have abandoned your principles?

A Hidden Life doesn’t get close to answering this question for us. However, this is a Terrence Malick film, so the question is not even evident at all. Nothing is, except the audio-visuals: In addition to reams of pages of voice-overs, which is, unfortunately, par for the course in a Malick production, there is also the expected curated selection of classical music (Bach, Beethoven, Dvořák) and other stunning instrumental pieces (Górecki, Pärt), as well as breathtaking emerald-green scenery that is far more complex than the film ever tries to be. 

Based on the true story of Franz Jägerstätter, a young Austrian farmer who refused to swear an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler, the plot is more substantial than many of the director’s other recent films. And yet, because it is Malick, we get very few scenes of genuine drama. Instead, there are plenty of oh-so-serious voice-overs or off-screen monologues to convey romance and struggle. These narrations are delivered in English by German actors. And since Malick has never cared much for the realism of the spoken word, they all fall flat.

We first meet Franz (August Diehl) and his young wife, Fani (Valerie Pachner), in 1939, around the time Germany invades Poland. We don’t get to see any of this, however, because the camera is too busy roving the lush green hillsides and calling our attention to the prominent church tower in the small town of St. Radegund, very close to the former border with Germany. (Austria had been annexed by the German Reich in March 1938.) The town’s aggressively nationalistic and often drunk town mayor likes to rant and rave about how “foreigners swarm over our streets – immigrants who don’t care for the past, only for what they can grab”. And the townspeople appear to share these views.

But all the while, the taciturn Franz’s face is sombre. We see his stubborn resistance. We see the wheels turning in his head. And we see his unwillingness to take up arms against Germany’s so-called enemies. But whatever personal, emotional or intellectual motivation he has remains obscured all the way through. Why does he resist when no one else does? What makes him different? Where does he find the resolve to persist despite threats of violence and, ultimately, the certainty that this path leads to an early death?

At first, Franz is called up to do military training. Although he is against the idea of ultimately using this knowledge to fight for the Reich, he heeds the call. A few years later, with the war in full swing, he is called up to serve, but upon arrival at the garrison, he refuses to pledge allegiance to Hitler and is arrested. He says he would be willing to serve in a non-combat capacity, but for this, he also has to take a loyalty oath. Thus begins his incarceration, which quickly leads to a trial and, in short order, his execution.

While he is away, his wife, Fani, becomes the target of the villagers because her husband has a moral compass. On top of taking care of her three young daughters, she also has to plough the field, harvest the crops and draw water from a drying well. But the village turns against her, first with the scowling looks they give her, then by shouting at her in public and finally by shamelessly stealing produce from her field. She is even hounded out of church by the stares of her fellow congregants. She is othered because of her husband’s refusal to kill for their Führer and, more importantly, because of her love of and respect for Franz. But what her own views are is impossible to determine despite the hours we spend with her.

While Franz languishes in Tegel prison in Berlin, the soundtrack continues to be filled with his and Fani’s monotonous voice-over readings of their letters to each other. But because Franz speaks so rarely, at least outside the ethereal sphere of the voice-over, we don’t understand what he is really thinking in real time, and this ponderous approach gets us nowhere close to understanding what brought him to this point. “I can’t do what I believe is wrong”, he says. The Nazis are perplexed as to why he would risk his life to take a stand that is bound to be forgotten by history. Time and again, they tell him that his voice doesn’t matter. However, the question of why they should care if his actions are supposedly so insignificant is never addressed.

It goes without saying that this kind of bravery, especially in retrospect, is absolutely extraordinary. History provides us with very few examples of such men or women. And it is a shame that the film recounting his story is so empty. Over the course of its three-hour running time, we get to know every inch of the farm and the granite mountains but learn very little about the man at the centre. He is religious, but we never see him reading the Bible. He has no real answers to others’ questions, but he has no questions of his own.

Despite the vertiginous use of wide-angle lenses and restless camera movements, not to mention the frames that decapitate its characters, there are also countless beautiful shots. But presenting a film about suffering as if it were a spread in Outdoor Photography is highly questionable, particularly as these images have no discernible purpose other than beauty for the sake of beauty. Unlike The Thin Red Line, in which Malick depicted the Solomon Islands as an exotic utopia ravaged by the horrors of war, A Hidden Life never deviates from portraying Radegund as an aesthetically pleasing wonderland that is always lush and green, no matter the season.

By now, the Malick approach to cinematography has long run its course. A film cannot live off push-ins, pull-outs, jump cuts, low angles, a dazzling colour palette and endless voice-overs alone. Any five-minute extract will contain all of these elements. Sometimes, there is a surprise, but it is never a good one, as when the camera suddenly takes a first-person perspective for no other reason than to show off. The most memorable example is of a prison guard assaulting Franz, causing the camera to flail around violently on the ground. Or when a fade-out elides an expected confrontation before it even starts. Or when a Nazi officer quotes from Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy.

The struggle and the suffering get lost in the poetry of it all. Whatever is going on, there will be a tiresome voice-over intruding on the action or a violin playing in the background. It’s all mesmerising and can lull us into a state of reverie but is completely lacking in immersion or immediacy. 

This is a story worth telling, but A Hidden Life is not the way to tell it.

Lucy (2014)

André Crous

Luc Besson’s fantastical, mad rush of a movie reminds us that the cinema is capable of wonderful things.

lucy-luc-besson-posterFrance/USA
4*

Director:
Luc Besson
Screenwriter:
Luc Besson
Director of Photography:
Thierry Arbogast

Running time: 90 minutes

Effortlessly referencing films as disparate as Nymphomaniac, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Transcendence, although with a deliberate lack of seriousness, Luc Besson’s Lucy is a breathless combination of visual effects and sympathetic fantasy like only the cinema can deliver. It never strives for anything more than pure entertainment and even sidesteps issues of power in favour of showing us unexpected domination, often by very gentle means, but the result is a thrilling ride you won’t want to miss.

The central (widely debunked) idea is one that most people have heard about at school or at college: Humans use a very small amount of their brain, and there is no telling what deeds we may be capable of if we used more. The screenplay hypothesises what would happen in a scenario where someone absorbed large quantities of CPH4, which is supposedly formed in the bodies of pregnant women to help the fetus grow, thereby rendering the individual almost infinitely brilliant.

Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, the girlfriend of a smalltime drug dealer in Taiwan, who is kidnapped and forced to be a drug mule carrying CPH4, hidden in a bag stitched into her stomach. But when one of her kidnappers tries to fondle her and she fights back, she also gets kicked in the stomach, and the CPH4 bursts into her veins, filling her with immense power and boosting her mental capacity into the higher double-digits.

The person who gives meaning and a measure of credibility to her rapid development is the brain researcher, Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman, who provides the fantastical plot with the right measure of gravitas it needs while also linking the material with that of Wally Pfister’s Transcendence, a similar but far inferior movie in which he played a very similar part). Norman has written volumes on the potential of the human brain, but most of it is pure conjecture. That is, until Lucy contacts him. She has just read all his work in a matter of minutes and tells him he is on the right track. However, she has only about 24 hours left on Earth as her mind will expand to the point where her body cannot contain her any longer.

And so the clock starts ticking while director Luc Besson points us in strange but thoroughly entertaining directions. The first half of the film is unexpectedly closely tied to Lars von Trier’s two-part Nymphomaniac films, as simplistic metaphors are made very vivid, although the effect is at times laughable, such as when Lucy is in danger and there is a sudden cut to an antelope being chased by a cheetah. These references culminate with Besson’s use of Mozart’s “Requiem”, which Von Trier also used in his film.

But the film’s loose structure enables Besson to incorporate references to 2001: A Space Odyssey, in particular the stargate sequence but also the unforgettable monkey, obviously played by someone in an ape suit, with which both Kubrick’s and Besson’s films open. By the time we meet up with the monkey again towards the end of Lucy, having gone through something of a magical ride on a time machine that conjures up haunting images, we realise that Besson is attracting us on a primal level, through memories and desires to see moments from the past in a way only made possible by the technology of the present.

The film is not entirely successful, however, as it suffers from a few dialogues that don’t come across as particularly believable, such as the overly descriptive telephone conversation between Lucy and her mother, and a faux stargate sequence that simply cannot compete with the one that came 45 years earlier in one of Kubrick’s masterpieces.

A few details are also missing, such as an explanation for her ability to learn languages without any significant exposure to them, or her inability to notice her car being tailed when her level of brain use is nearing 99 percent. But in general, the plot is very easy to follow and while the film never appears to be pretentious, it certainly strikes a very able balance between amusement and intelligence, inasmuch as the one is constrained by the other in a form of mass entertainment like this one.

This may seem at times like a dumbed-down version of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, but while there is enough to keep the popcorn gallery entertained, Lucy also shows us the wonders the cinema can make us a witness to by recreating time in its almost unimaginable richness. Words cannot adequately describe the sense of awe we feel seeing the world going in reverse in fast motion, and while these sequences are also slightly comical, they remind us what movies can make us see and feel that we can never experience in the world outside the theatre.

The Thin Red Line (1998)

André Crous

USA
3*

Director:
Terrence Malick
Screenwriter:
Terrence Malick
Director of Photography:
John Toll

Running time: 163 minutes

The most distracting thing about Terrence Malick’s longest film is not the length, nor is it the extremely slow pace of the narrative or the reflective, fragmentary voice-overs we are treated to by many different characters. No, it is the number of celebrities, almost all of whom unfortunately draw our attention away from the film’s desire to approach the characters of its soldiers as intimately as possible. Forget Grand Hotel; this film features Jim Caviezel, Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson, Elias Koteas, Tim Blake Nelson, Adrien Brody, Jared Leto, John C. Reilly, Ben Chaplin, John Travolta, Nick Nolte, Nick Stahl, John Cusack, George Clooney and a few more. It is ludicrous to pack a film as sensitive as this one with names like these, and while the celebrities almost certainly secured Malick the budget he needed, the effect on the appreciation of the film is devastating.

If you’ve ever heard of Terrence Malick, then you shouldn’t be surprised that The Thin Red Line is not your average war epic. Malick’s voice-overs fill the soundtrack as much as actual dialogue, and despite the battle waged between the Americans and the Japanese, nature is the real character of the film. Set almost entirely on the island of Guadalcanal, part of the Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean, it focuses on the experiences of a group of soldiers who are fighting the Japanese and coming to terms with formerly abstract terms such as “death” and “danger”.

One of these soldiers is Private Witt, who went AWOL and is living on an island with native Melanesians when his country tracks him down at the beginning of the film and makes him join Charlie Company, an outfit whose mission it is to take out the Japanese on Guadalcanal. His idyllic life on the island had been beautiful and carefree, but he is about to be confronted up close with the loss of life and the loss of natural innocence, as a streak of blood on a blade of grass subtly informs us early on.

Nature, interior reflection – in the form of voice-overs – and reactions to death are what this film mostly concerns itself with. As Private Witt, Jim Caviezel delivers a performance that draws the viewer like a magnet. He is cool, calm, and wise, with a spirit much older than his youthful face could ever reveal. Witt is one of the few characters that we can hold on to while others slide in and out of view, without reason. Admittedly, Malick does make an explicit point that it is possible for all men to somehow share a big spirit, and that we, like nature, are all connected by a spiritual thread we fail to recognise. But very little is done to develop this insight, which quickly disappears.

There are many voice-overs, always delivered dispassionately, but since the story is not tied to a particular individual, it is often very difficult to establish whose voice we are hearing; sometimes, the speaker doesn’t even appear in the scene. In this way, we hear the disembodied voices of (at least) Privates Witt, Bell (Ben Chaplin), Private First Class Doll (Dash Mihok), First Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn) and Lieutenant Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte).

Some actors deliver stellar performances, most notably Jim Caviezel and Ben Chaplin, who absorb the chaos around them without being overly shaken by it and yet portray absolute humanity and a dignity that is beautiful. I also want to acknowledge the strength of Elias Koteas’s character, Captain Staros, who seems to possess divine force when he speaks his native Greek, and Nick Nolte’s Lieutenant Colonel Tall, who is euphoric at his first taste of real war and doesn’t flinch even while grenades explode around him. Some actors are quite bad, such as Dash Mihok (an actor who has played wonderful roles in other films), who seems to be scared when he is not shocked and who never loses his slightly childlike demeanour. And then there are many actors who were not given any opportunity to develop their characters. Adrien Brody, always wide-eyed in this film, is seen but almost never heard, and George Clooney pops up in an interesting role… in the film’s final scene.

As usual for a Malick film, the audiovisual elements are simply stunning, and the director has included a romantic angle, which in this case does not serve the film well. One feels slightly embarrassed when Private Bell (Ben Chaplin) receives a letter from his wife, the context having been sketched previously with simple flashbacks that do not present us with a concrete picture, but Chaplin copes exceedingly well. For all the weaknesses of the screenplay (the entire plot can be summarised in a very short paragraph), the camera does some amazing tricks with its pitch perfectly coloured images, and the Melanesian choir music is unforgettable. Look out for an early scene, after the death of two soldiers, when sunlight turns the grass from dark-green to yellow.

Malick gets at the complexity of war and there are many interesting moments scattered throughout the film, including a captain’s desire to see his men protected, no matter what the effect on the battle, the awkwardness of battle depicted by soldiers running into each other while fleeing gunfire, and the universality of suffering, when a Japanese prisoner cries for the dead friends around him. But these moments, while rich and insightful, do not cohere into a strong narrative and ultimately we get the sense that Malick is meticulous but unable to move beyond the abstract and give us a physical experience of his world. The film has an abundance of water and greenery, and a sharp eye for human emotion, with some strong performances, but these are lonely elements in a film that gets caught up in its own rhetoric.

Days of Heaven (1978)

André Crous

USA
4*

Director:
Terrence Malick
Screenwriter:
Terrence Malick
Directors of Photography:
Néstor Almendros
Haskell Wexler

Running time: 95 minutes

Terrence Malick is a big ol’ romantic; just consider Badlands and The New World. Days of Heaven is in the same vein, and its images are breathtaking. It stars Richard Gere and Brooke Adams, who pretend to be brother and sister, lest other people “start talking”, and go to work in the Texas Panhandle in 1916, where they sack the wheat on the farm of a bachelor roughly their age. The farmer is never given a name, but ironically, he is the best-drawn character of the three.

Days of Heaven starts with the music of Camille Saint-Saëns, the famous seventh movement (“Aquarium”) of his “Carnival of the Animals”, and the music sets the tone for the rest of the score, composed by the master, Ennio Morricone. Malick’s images are dreamlike in colour yet very clearly “of this world”, and his characters seem to float through existence even though we can easily project our own fears onto them. For once, I think the film’s images themselves surpass even the beauty of the film’s Criterion DVD cover (the poster image at the top).

The film was famously shot mostly at magic hour (that brief window of time after sunset and before darkness), and as a result, the horizon is often bright orange, the sky is tinted purple-orange and the characters are bathed in hues of pink. Malick’s decision to shoot primarily (though, importantly, not exclusively) at this time of day inevitably led to some trouble, including errors in continuity, because shots would change from magic hour to full sunlight in a single scene. However, his directors of photography, Almendros and Wexler, knew how to cope with the demands of their director, and for the most part, these changes in lighting are not very significant.

It is true that the film has less plot than some music videos, but honestly, one doesn’t really care. Malick is a visual storyteller, and he easily manages to fill an entire film with action set on a single farm. The majestic farmhouse, perched on a hill, which looks out over the whole property and is reminiscent of the famous farmhouse in George Stevens’s Giant, appears in many shots in the background, and sometimes the camera pans from the action in a pond or in the fields back to the house in the background.

Brooke Adams’s character, Abby, who looks like a young Ali MacGraw, catches the eye of the farmer, who asks her to stay on at the farm past the end of the season. Her boyfriend, Billy, had heard that the farmer is ill, and they decide to let Abby stay on so that they could inherit the farmer’s money when he dies. Of course, he doesn’t die as quickly as they’d like,  and this fact generates some frustration in Billy. But Abby is carefree and starts to fall in love with the farmer, played by Sam Shepard, who never looked more handsome and genuinely cares for her.

Days of Heaven plays as a kind of memory – an idea supported by the voice-over of Abby’s young sister, Linda, who also joins them at the farm. But for some reason, the Linda on the soundtrack is the voice of the Linda as a young girl, which doesn’t make much sense. Also, the point of the view of the camera is always displaced from one character to another.

The inspiration for David Gordon Green‘s film, Undertow, is obvious, especially in the way both directors use dialogue in their respective films. In scenes with dialogue, Malick uses the age-old rule of starting a scene as late as possible and ending it as quickly as possible. These conversational moments are effective, although some scenes exist purely for the sake of producing one or two lines of important dialogue before we move on to the next poetic scene with wheat ears quivering under a gentle breeze.

Days of Heaven‘s finest moment, the attack of the locusts, may be compared to the buffalo hunt in Dances with Wolves, but it also has a very important symbolic role to play, as it comes at a critical point in the narrative, and Malick makes use of this moment to introduce his only vertically downward shot – a divine point of view that plays on the locusts’ significance in a biblical context as well.

But for all the beautiful imagery, the central story and, in particular, the characters of Abby and Billy needed to be fleshed out a bit more. Abby, in particular, seems to have no real attachment, and one doesn’t get a clear idea of her true interest. The film contains some interesting glances from smaller characters who are suspicious of the relationship between Abby and her “brother”, Billy, and these are well integrated into the flow of the story.

Terrence Malick’s film is enchanting and, despite any objections one might have about the story or the characters, he demonstrates that the cinema has a powerful ability to present even the simplest of stories in harmonious sounds and images that can be truly astounding.