Watched at the Coolidge Corner in Brookline, alone. (This theater has enormous sentimental value for me due to its life as a repertory house in the 1980s when I was in high school in nearby Chestnut Hill. One of the formative places of my adolescence.)

There's something deeply countercultural about a whole movie that basically exists to depict the beauty of being alive and being in love and then takes us (with an admirable devotion to the modest accumulation of detail) through the suffering that follows taking a stand against fascism. You know that weariness you feel in an overblown or bombastic superhero movie when the whole earth, or the whole universe, is thrown into peril? It's told, not shown, because there's no way to show the whole universe in peril. It's a strain on the imagination and your empathetic engagement with the movie, a kind of hectoring voice loudly exhorting you to care as much as you possibly can. This is like the opposite of that. It's just one man and his life and the life of his family, up against the machinery of the Third Reich. As is pointed out to him multiple times, he can't budge that machinery by his non-participation, and no one will ever care that he refused to cooperate with evil. The movie works both ways: you feel the pain of uncertainty (do they really matter, our defiant gestures?) and also a kind of ironic vindication (because here I am, eighty years later, and Malick has definitely got me caring about this man's choices). I will say, that his reasons for making the choice remain essentially cryptic; he never gets the symbolic victory of an eloquent speech explaining why he is right. So we don't ever get it either. Admirable, but it still means the movie is muted in its impact. I have my own engagement and interest in Christian pacifism, which closed some of the gap, but I still felt the absence of that rhetorical catharsis.