If in this rendition of Jagerstatter’s life the man was not setting himself up to be a martyr, then what was he doing? Maybe the right thing, as he saw it, but he never explains it to anyone. He becomes almost entirely uncommunicative by the third hour, scarcely what the movie needs at this point. But this is systematically ignored in the film, as is his inscrutable reluctance to discuss the matter with his wife and family. He becomes a conscientious objector to the war and military service when he knows this is a capital offense, and yet Malick, with three hours on his hands, never gives him the opportunity to thoroughly explain his thinking.įor anyone who has even taken a cursory look at the real Jagerstatter’s behavior, one can’t help but note the ever-increasing religious component to his refusal to join Hitler’s team. Third, it leaves the true nature of his objections fuzzy and vague. Second, it distances him from his family. First, it leaves Franz no way to communicate the development of his attitudes. This development presents major dramatic problems. There are increasingly long stretches in the pic during which the leading character doesn’t say a thing, even to his family, suggesting that he’s taking the maxim, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it,” a little too far. Franz confides his misgivings to the local priest, who flatly warns him he might be shot for objecting and adds, “Your sacrifice would benefit no one.” Franz is the only refusenik around and, from this point on, the character effectively shuts up. So just when you ache for the film to begin to go deeper, it instead starts flatlining. When Franz is first called up by the Reich for military training, in 1940, he goes along with it like everyone else, although in a letter home he does query, “What’s happened to our country?” After he’s released to return home and toil in the harvest, literal storm clouds coalesce around the mountains, as visual beauty begins to merge with simplistic metaphors and storytelling in a way that doesn’t let up. However, the local political conditions are considerably different in the new film. Right here you want to call a time-out: Haven’t we seen nearly these identical images somewhere before - of gorgeous fields, scythes cutting through them, open spaces as far as the eye can see, land unspoiled but for animals scuttling about and a rustic, hand-built house anyone would love to call home? Wait, weren’t they in a film called Days of Heaven? Was that really 41 years ago? The answer is ‘yes’ all around. He and his handsome, sturdy wife Franziska (Valerie Pachner) have a brood of young daughters and some fellow farmers who help maintain a high-altitude farm, plus an abode that comes dangerously close to looking like something out of the Sundance catalog. Maintaining a large farm in a slice of Alpine paradise is Franz Jagerstatter, who, as impersonated by August Diehl, looks like a poster boy for Aryan male beauty whom Hitler himself would have approved (the real Jagerstatter was a far cry from this standard). And the way the area is shot by Malick and his cinematographer Jorg Widmer (a veteran Steadicam wiz who operated for Malick on the latter’s most recent feature, Song to Song) isn’t any less rhapsodic, although now it’s accompanied by the strains of European classical masters, not Broadway luminaries. But in the context of upper Austria before and at the beginning of the war, after Hitler pulled his native country into the Reich, it was a different matter, one the film only fuzzily presents.Īfter a vigorous opening in which black-and-white newsreel footage from the time lays out the Fuehrer’s rise and march to war, the film settles down in a gorgeous precinct of northern Austria that can’t be too far from the land of The Sound of Music. Of course, when you’ve got the Nazis as the villains, there’s scarcely any dramatic need to explain anyone’s opposition to them. Unfortunately, instead of embracing the weighty moral, religious and political components of the story, Malick has alternately deflected and minimized them.
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