Sublimity: 1917 and A Hidden Life

I am in love with Sam Mendes' 1917. In fact, I can't wait to see it again when it opens nationwide next weekend. In the first place, I love World War I movies – actually, I kind of love WWI everything. That period of time is so interesting to me, and WWI doesn't get enough press as an event that shifted the course of history, overshadowed as it is by the Second World War.

You probably know that 1917 is shot by the genius cinematographer Roger Deakins. You may also know – although this is not clear from 1917's trailer – that the entirety of Sam Mendes film is edited so that it looks as though it is a single long take. This is showy cinematography, and it works excellently. Of course, the fact that it appears to be a single shot means that one begins to pay more attention to the camera itself, where it goes, what it looks at, who it follows.

There are some drawbacks to this approach. As I say, this camera work is flashy, and there are moments in act two when I was so visually blown away by what I was watching that I was thinking more about Roger Deakins and less about the story. There is also the question of cuts. It's clear that there are some cuts, and so (at least in act one) I was playing a small game of oh they could have made a cut there. But all of this is worth it.

But this one-shot gimmick (and it is a gimmick, even though it works well and I loved it) also begins to work thematically. The camera never gets off the ground to look at the war from a distance. World War I is not a war that was fought from a distance. It was fought on the ground, in the mud, in ditches. And it was fought over lands that used to be filled with people – small towns, farmlands, churches. Because we never leave our two main characters, we feel the weight of their mission in a kind of horizontal way. They must get from here to there and they must cross through, go under. They must run. They (and we) are not allowed the relief of seeing the war from the sky or from the point of view of strategy of any kind. They (and we) see it as immediate, mundane. It's a brilliant filmmaking strategy.

There is also the question of time. This is a film in which two young men are given a mission that they must execute immediately. They must cross a large distance and they must do it quickly or sixteen hundred men will die. So the fact that the camera never leaves them, never looks away, is a kind of insistence, a demand that they move. The stakes in 1917 always feel very, very high.

1917 is a simple story designed to pack an emotional wallop. And it does. It also tells the kind of war story I like – one told from the perspective of the men and women who fought the war and one that is very, very clear about the effect of war on the bodies of the soldiers, the civilians, the land, and in the case of WWI, the animals. It's a wonderfully told story, and I was deeply moved. This has, also, in part to do with the excellent acting in 1917. Most of the roles in the film are quite small – little more than cameos – but these appearances are uniformly excellent. Andrew Scott has a brilliant section in act one, and my sister and I both looked at each other and smiled when Mark Strong showed up (she recognized him by his voice even before I knew it was him). Strong is, as always, superb. Claire Duburcq has a single scene, and she is also wonderful. And then there's Richard Madden, who has a gorgeous, extraordinary role near the very end of the film that I won't say anything more about other than to say that Madden absolutely knocks this out of the park and that I'm getting emotional just thinking about it. The film's two leads, George Mackay and Dean-Charles Chapman, are perfect. I loved both of them from the very beginning, and they're doing top-notch work throughout. I would give both Oscar nominations if it were up to me.

I will stop talking about this movie, but I want to say that if much of the pleasure of watching 1917 was, for me, witnessing the extraordinary filmmaking that Mendes and his team did, the film always feels grounded, deep, and honest. It doesn't get lost in its own flash. The filmmaking is in service of something much larger, and I don't think Mendes' film loses sight of that ever.

Oscar: I would expect a boatload. Sound mixing, sound editing, visual effects, Thomas Newman's score (which is by turns action-packed and gentle), cinematography (obviously), picture, director, and screenplay all seem like slam-dunks to me. Film editing and production design both seem possible as well. Makeup and hairstyling could happen, too. It might be as many as 11. They're deserved.

* * *

Another gorgeously shot movie is Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life. Now, I love Malick very much – The Thin Red Line, The New World, and The Tree of Life are some of my favorite films. But his approach has started to feel a bit repetitive, as if he's stuck in something of a rut and can't quite get out of it. Malick is invested in nature and nature photography, especially the relationship of human beings with the land.

But A Hidden Life has more of a script – and maybe more of a plot – than Malick's last few films. This movie is about a conscientious objector in Austria during World War II. August Diehl and Valerie Pachner are farmers in the mountains of Austria who live in a small village beneath gorgeous towering cliffs and a waterfall. It's an idyllic, beautiful space, and it's shot lovingly by Jörg Widmer. Malick's usual voice-overs are, in this case, actual letters that Franz and Fani Jägerstätter wrote to each other while he was imprisoned by the Third Reich.

The film didn't totally work for me. It's beautiful, of course, and Malick's ability to capture affection and care and his meditations on family and community all work very well. But there's something indirect or tired here, for me. Maybe it is that Malick doesn't really seem to be investigating anything here. He knows the answers already, and so the story feels over before it begins. In many ways, the whole film (and it is a long one) is played in one key, as if it is over before it begins. This is, perhaps, a philosopher's approach, but for me it lacks dynamism.

Like 1917, A Hidden Life has a lot of appearances by great actors. Matthias Schoenaerts, Alexander Fehling, and the late great Bruno Ganz all have small parts. Franz Rogowski, who is so great in this year's Transit, is excellent as Franz's friend.

I want to highlight a very strange but very cool choice that Malick made as he crafted A Hidden Life. The film is not shot in sets that look like Nazi prisons. Instead it's shot in prison ruins. At times we are in rooms where there are dozens of bed frames but no beds, for example, or where plants are coming in through the walls. (Even the churches in A Hidden Life are actively being restored during the course of the movie.) So what we see instead of a realistic portrayal of Franz imprisoned by the Germans is a kind of strange rumination about this philosophical or ethical question as a kind of haunting of the German prison. This is a fascinating choice, and for me this made much of the prison stuff feel strange and spiritual in a very good way.

Oh! Side note: in 2019 I read George Eliot's Middlemarch, from which this film's title is taken. I loved this novel, and I've shared the quotation before, but it's worth sharing again. A Hidden Life and Middlemarch both end with the following: "Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Alexander broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; 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."

After the film, I wondered aloud what all of these meditations on nature have to do with the Nazis and political imprisonments and Dayne said something like If you appreciate life, you can't choose to kill or It is much easier to destroy life when you don't know how beautiful it is. Dayne is, of course, right about this, and it does help me see A Hidden Life in a smarter way. But I do feel like this movie is a bit too repetitive ("do you think this matters to anyone?" is repeated a great many times) and just a bit too one-note.

Oscar: James Newton Howard's score, which is absolutely beautiful, is overshadowed in the movie (Malick always does this) by music by Arvo Pärt and Henryk Górecki so much that JMH was certainly disqualified in this category. Widmer hasn't made a lot of films, and so it seems to me that the cinematographers branch probably won't nominate him. The actors are all European... in short, I don't think we're looking at any nominations, despite the obvious quality of the filmmaking.