![]() ![]() ![]() 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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