'A Hidden Life' examines the cost, and value, of resisting the totalitarian impulse

The fascinating, grotesque thing about totalitarianism isn't so much the way it deforms the individual who accedes to the totalitarian impulse. And it's not so much the way that it comes to define the lives of those who stand apart from the crowd, whether publicly in the square or privately in one's mind.

No. It's the way the totalitarian impulse degrades the relationship between those who accede and those who resist. I don't just mean the informing, though there's that. I mean the ways in which those who have given themselves over resent those who have refused to: the anger, the sense of judgment. I mean the ways in which whole families come under suspicion, become excommunicated from the public life.

Terrence Malick's "A Hidden Life," streaming now on HBO Max, is a resolutely moral work about this particularly crushing aspect of totalitarianism, and the cost of holding on to your soul while under this kind of pressure. The power of the movie is not in its timeliness but in its eternal truth.

In the final years of Austrian farmer Franz Jagerstatter's (August Diehl) life, Malick provides a road map of resistance, but not against an evil state. As numerous characters - wardens, village officials, his priests, his own lawyer - remind Jägerstätter, his refusal to utter an oath declaring loyalty to Hitler will do nothing to undermine the Fuhrer's war machine.

What they don't understand is that Jägerstätter's fidelity to his conscience will keep him from losing his soul.

That desire isn't purely religious, though Jägerstätter would later be beatified by the Catholic Church for his refusal to submit to the Nazis. There's an Orwellian sense of the soul, too: Jagerstatter wins the war over Big Brother. Because he holds to his beliefs, he was still able to love himself.

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You get the sense that the blusteriest of those who denounce Jägerstätter, such as the mayor (Karl Markovics) who rants about degenerate outsiders invading the homeland, will simply go about their lives once the war is over. Perhaps they'll feel an inkling of torment, but they'll bury it under self-righteousness, believing, perhaps correctly, that as mere products of their time, nothing more should be expected of them.

"You're worse. You're worse than them," the mayor says to Jägerstätter at one point, comparing this farmer to Austria's opponents. "They are enemies, but you are a traitor." The man who refuses to go along is always more despised than the invader.

Men such as Judge Lueben (Bruno Ganz) will be more haunted by their choices. In one of the film's most powerful set pieces, Lueben calls Jägerstätter into chambers. He tells Jägerstätter that nothing he does matters, that he will be forgotten, that he cannot shorten or prolong the war, that others will be forced to take his place. When Jägerstätter does not reply, Lueben asks, haltingly: "Do you . . . judge me?"

This is the fear of every man who gives into the bloodlust of Nazism or fascism or communism - or any other blighted ism that demands conformity and leaves death in its wake: the fear that someone else would stand and say no, that they would not join the madness, that they would not bloody their hands.

The judge fears being judged. He is right to.

But Jägerstätter's reply is humble: "I don't judge you. I'm not saying he's wicked, [or] I am right. I don't know everything. A man may do wrong and you can't get out of it to make his life clear. Maybe . . . he'd like to go back, but he can't. But . . . I have this feeling inside me that I can't do what I believe is wrong." Lueben is shattered by this reply, and Ganz plays him with a sort of knowing horror. He's a man awakened to the wrong he's done but, as Jägerstätter suggests, unable to act with moral clarity.

Lueben was, of course, wrong about Jagerstatter's invisibility to history. Malick's monument to the man and documentation of the suffering foisted upon his loved ones for his refusal to bend the knee will live on as an artistic triumph.

The movie is also a commentary on the nature of artistry and the artist itself. At one point, Jagerstatter has a discussion with a painter in a church.

"What we do is we create sympathies. We create admirers. We don't create followers," this painter (Johan Leysen) says. "Someday, I'll paint a true Christ."

One can't help but think back to the use of film within the film, the images Malick lifts from Leni Riefenstahl in "A Hidden Life"'s opening moments - Hitler descending in a plane, the rallies at Nuremberg - and later footage from newsreels demonstrating the devastation the Wehrmacht has left across Europe.

Hitler's presence looms over the proceedings like a vengeful spirit, his speeches echoing through the mountains, his ideas corrupting the populace, his demands bending their will to his whims.

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