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Maestro moment
The strike is over and Maestro is off to the races. The film opens in theaters next week (in New York and LA — I’m not sure about other cities, someone tell me if it’s playing in Chicago, STAT) and then again on Netflix later in the month. Maestro himself appeared in CBS Sunday Morning besides the Bernstein children where they talked about how both Bernstein and Cooper eat food with their hands (so do I) and then Cooper starts tearing up at the end because he misses the presence of Leonard Bernstein so much (again, same). You can read a lot of cynicism into this if you want, but you can also consider it how I think about Kenneth Branagh talking about how he cried in the edit bay all the time working on Belfast: to these guys, the movie is real.
Spike Lee also moderated a Q&A for Maestro. This is nice, but it is also funny because there is lore here: one of the great Spike Lee reaction images from a few years ago derives back from listening to Cooper talk during a Hollywood Reporter Roundtable. During the A Star is Born press tour, Cooper also revealed that he read for a part in a Lee film only to be pretty quickly ushered out the door. Happy to see these two back together. I was trying to figure out if Lee and Bernstein himself ever crossed paths — probably not. I hope someone at this Q&A got Lee to talk about the use of Copland in He Got Game but I have a feeling it was all pretty Maestro-focused.
Speaking of film scores
On Sunday afternoon, we went to go see Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life which was playing in MOMI’s Reverse Shot at 20 series. I’d seen the film before; Phil hadn’t. Longtime Fran Magazine readers know I have great affection for Malick movies — a filmmaker whose entire output I more or less enjoy.1 I have distinct memories of seeing the trailer for A Hidden Life four or five times at the Angelika in the fall of 2019 — I was still going to the Angelika a lot in the fall of 2019 — and realizing that if I had to see that movie on those small screens, I was going to be robbed of some greater experience. I felt this even though I’d only seen a smattering of Malick films at that point. I was so moved every time I saw the trailer — less so because it looked sad2 or whatever, more because it looked so immense. A Hidden Life came out sometime in that weird winter and then got lost in the shuffle of pre-COVID releases. I never wound up seeing it in theaters. Instead, I watched with my poet neighbors that fall, rented on Amazon. I loved it and it was immense, but I also recall it was pretty tedious to watch in a home theater set-up. Call me insane, but I think some of these recent three hour epics might lose some ineffable quality when watched on TV.
Seeing A Hidden Life on the big screen was — as I suspected it might be — all-consuming and overwhelming. Not unlike when I saw The Tree of Life at the Paris Theatre earlier in the fall, I was moved to tears so often that I might as well have been just consistently crying after a certain point. It’s possible that you think, as a Fran Magazine reader, that I am “always crying at stuff”; this is actually a pretty recent, perhaps post-height of the pandemic, movie-going experience. There’s an obvious, topical significance to watching a movie about a guy who refuses to fight in a war he feels is unjust, but the weight of A Hidden Life is felt regardless of current context, in part because of the pastoral Malick establishes in the film’s first hour.
Set in 1940s Austria, Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl, who many will recognize from Inglourious Basterds) and his wife Fani (Valerie Pachner) live and work on their farm up in the mountains, not far from Salzburg. They have three daughters, and a handful of farm animals — the classics: cows, sheep, chickens, one donkey. Much of A Hidden Life depends on how moved you are by the depiction of this rural existence, whether the small town isolation and beauty of the environment is affecting or not. There’s a case to be made that Malick’s film is kind of a “faith picture” — not in the Fathom events kind of way, but it’s not not that either. This is an edenic existence. Unlike the domestic life in, say, The Tree Of Life, we’re not exposed to familial disagreements or violence. Franz and Fani live collaboratively with each other and the land, their neighbors and their friends. Throughout these sequences, we listen to Thomas Newton Howard’s scoring, all a variation on the above linked theme.
As the Second World War intensifies, Franz and Fani grow isolated from their community, and Franz is imprisoned for his refusal to fight. The events of the film are repetitive — Franz is asked to go to war, he refuses, he’s asked by someone else to go to war, he refuses. And so on. As the world of the film becomes worse, Malick will occasionally fade to black and then reset the viewer in Radegund, the small town where Franz and Fani live. The main theme to the film will kick back in, and the camera will drift across landscape and farm to show the ever-changing seasons. Waterfalls freeze and thaw. Wheat is planted and harvested.
What feels so evocative about the use of Howard’s score in A Hidden Life is not that it is, say, “emotionally manipulative” so much as it does gesture towards what is being given up through Franz’s actions. When that main theme kicks in — which I think happens five or six times throughout the film’s three hour runtime — you know you’re about to see some of the nicest stuff of all time: toddlers running around with chickens, a beautiful brown dairy cow, a church procession, fresh loaves of bread coming right out of the oven. Rather than double down on the violence of Franz’s imprisonment (though there is enough of that), Malick is more inclined to show what is being sacrificed as well as what is at stake. This is sort of the genius of Malick and Howard’s adaptation of classical music in their films: rather than use music to guide the feelings of a viewer, music is used to create a memory within watching. We come to recognize themes and ideas sonically — when those opening piano notes fade in, we already know what we are going to see: the land, the world. “The wind, the wheat, the sky!” as one character says. Not unlike the parts of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest that I found most compelling — A Hidden Life is as much about climate change, what war does to the environment and what people who go to war do to their environments in turn, as it is about resistance and identity.
I know there are some Malick viewers who are less keen on the filmmaker’s work since The Tree of Life, but to me, A Hidden Life crystalizes all that is remarkable about his style. What felt most evocative watching the director’s most recent work is that it does not feel in conflict with his past work, but rather a steady accumulation of belief, ethos, and style. These movies have always been humanist and natural, even when they are about SXSW. A Hidden Life is no more political than what came before it. Rather what sets it apart it is its commitment to beauty and scale. The mountains feel big, the grass is long. The earth lives and breathes. “One day we’ll know what all this is for,” Fani says towards the end of the film, but she already knows.
There’s stronger Malick and weaker Malick, but there’s no a single work in the filmography I actively dislike… though I guess I have no real idea what to do with something like Voyage of Time. Still: of the feature films, you could offer to put any one of these on my television at any time of day and I’d be like, “go for it.”
It is also too reliant on Owen Gleiberman pull quotes… they should have gone to at like two other guys when they were cutting this.
Re: Maestro in Chicago, showtimes seemingly start Dec 1 and I will be seated. Personally I feel Netflix takes us midwesterners for granted! Not the first time we have gotten stuff late if they deign to send it to us at all.
A Hidden Life is the movie that made Malick click for me. Love the score!