Cannes 2019: Anchored in story in a way his last few movies have not been, this World War II drama is the director’s most monumental work since
The key word in all the advance talk about Terrence Malick’s “A Hidden Life” has been linear. The film, which premiered on Sunday at the Cannes Film Festival, was supposed to mark the reclusive but prolific director’s return to script-based filmmaking after years spent working in an improvisational, ruminative style; it was billed as Malick telling a story again rather than Malick indulging in his occasionally glorious, occasionally perplexing flights of fancy.
Of course, linear is a relative term when it comes to Terrence Malick. “A Hidden Life” is anchored in story in a way the director’s last few films have not been, but its storytelling rhythms are quintessentially his, with all the beauty and all the languor that entails.
Based on the true story of an Austrian conscientious objector who refused to fight for Nazi Germany in World War II, “A Hidden Life” is certainly the director’s best movie since his 2011 Palme d’Or winner “The Tree of Life” — it’s his most monumental film since then, and perhaps his most sentimental film ever. And it is also slow and meditative, requiring viewers to sink into and surrender to that particular Malick style that some find maddening.
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It may well be seen as the movie where Malick gets his mojo back, though that would be an unfair characterization of a man who has remained a fascinating filmmaker over the eight curious years since “The Tree of Life.” He’s made more movies in that stretch than any similar period of his career, but gotten less acclaim for them. After creating a meditative, rapturous template with “Tree of Life” — improvisation-based, full of whispered asides and fragments of conversation — he went all the way down that rabbit hole with “To the Wonder” and “Knight of Cups,” with increasingly frustrating results for those who want more than gorgeous images and narrative conundrums.
But “Voyage of Time,” his 2016 “documentary” on, essentially, the creation of the universe, was both ravishing and richly ruminative, particularly in the extended, Cate Blanchett-narrated version rather than the shorter, Brad Pitt-narrated “Malick for kids” IMAX version.
