“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts,” wrote George Eliot in Middlemarch, “and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” The passage provides the title of A Hidden Life, a cinematic monument of Christian apologetics.
It’s a slow, stately film but a marvelous one, steeped in faith and emotionally replete. Catholics and other Christians sometimes complain that there is little offered to them at the movies; what is offered tends to be second-rate. A Hidden Life, though, is a deeply considered and in the end staggering argument for a life lived according to Christ’s teaching by one of cinema’s great American artists, writer-director Terrence Malick. Church groups and other members of Christ’s flock, especially Catholics, should make it a point to see this adaptation of the life of Franz Jägerstätter, a Catholic Austrian farmer who refused to serve the cause of Adolf Hitler during World War II. Jägerstätter was beatified in 2007.
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