Movie Review: The Hiding Place (2023)

Movie Review: The Hiding Place (2023)

World War II stories are always popular, but some are more iconic than others. The Hiding Place, Dutch watchmaker Corrie ten Boom’s 1971 autobiography of how her family helped smuggle approximately 800 Jews, is one of the most iconic. Adaptations include a 1975 film that gained Jeannette Clift George a Golden Globe nomination. George provided the impetus for this new version of The Hiding Place when she asked playwright A.S. “Pete” Peterson to script a stage version for the A.D. Players theatre company.

Sadly, George passed in 2017, two years before the play premiered. However, the responses were good enough that more productions followed. Rabbit Roome Theatre staged one of the productions in 2022, and plans for a movie adaptation followed.

The movie, directed by Laura Matula and scripted by Peterson, is not quite a play or a movie: as the movie’s website puts it, “Like a play, it’s performed on stage. But like a movie, the camera is up close and personal, giving it the feel of a traditional feature film.” The movie played in American theatres last week (August 3, 5, and plans are in place for future dates in at least one territory) and will play overseas soon (August 16). After that, it will presumably reach new audiences via streaming.

The movie’s release is notable for several reasons. It’s always an event when a classic WWII book gets adapted in a high-quality production. Questions of how this movie compares to the 1975 film will continue for quite some time.

It also marks a new phase for a highly respected Christian art venture. The Rabbit Room began in 2006 when Peterson’s brother Andrew wanted to create an artist’s community founded along Inklings-esque lines. The Rabbit Room is a back room in the Eagle and Child where the Inklings held many of their weekly pub meetings 

Since 2006, the Rabbit Room has evolved to include (among other things) a blog, a virtual community, an annual conference, and a publishing house (best known for its Every Moment Holy books). To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time that Rabbit Room Theatre has been listed as producing a film, though not the Petersons’ first venture in visual media. Andrew writes the children’s fantasy series The Wingfeather Saga and helped produce Angel Studios’ animated series of the same name.

Unlike too many Christian art groups, the Rabbit Room has managed to be smart (the press releases serious nonfiction like Diana Glyer’s The Major and the Missionary) without becoming snobbish (the press has also released children’s picture books like Henry and the Chalk Dragon). Seeing them release a movie signals a new era in people’s awareness of their work. Given that The Hiding Place is a play-film hybrid, it’s also easy to see parallels to The Most Reluctant Convert, the play-film hybrid released by Max McLean’s Fellowship for the Performing Arts in 2021. Like The Rabbit Room, McLean’s Fellowship is a Christian entertainment group that has bridged the high culture/low culture gap and seems poised for new exposure as they move into filmmaking.

Like The Most Reluctant Convert, the key dilemma with The Hiding Place is how to turn a play into a film. Various approaches have been tried. The Man in the Glass Booth avoided fancy camera work, but director Arthur Hiller observes that the filmmakers revised the play’s witty dialogue to make it not just a cerebral story, to “create more of an emotional environment.” Sleuth found clever ways to open the play’s world (putting the opening scene in a maze, clever editing that highlights props to make them symbols of the characters’ dialogue). The Most Reluctant Convert maintained its one-man play structure but made the hero more of a narrator (walking in and out of scenes shot on location, dramatizing whatever he’s discussing).

The Hiding Place keeps the stage environment but alters how audiences perceive it.  Most of the play’s action occurs on a revolving set (three rooms alternately decorated to be the ten Booms’ watch shop, their living quarters, or Ravensbrück concentration camp quarters). Characters come in and out of these rooms to act out the main scenes—Corrie and her sister Betsie talking with their father in his watch shop about whether they can shelter Jews, having dinner in their dining room with Jews they are sheltering, and so on. However, Corrie spends much of her time in the foreground, just outside the revolving set, narrating her story to the audience. During the play’s first half, a German officer appears on the set’s righthand side and interrogates Corrie as she narrates.

This setup wouldn’t seem too clever if all this action had been filmed like a standard filmed play (one camera that never or barely moves). Audiences would see every trick (the set turning to show the audience the living room instead of the watch shop, etc.). Fortunately, as mentioned earlier, The Hiding Place is filmed like a movie. The camera closes in to focus on the characters’ faces or switches from one camera to the next as Corrie goes from remembering something that Betsie said to Betsie saying it. Harsh lights cultivate shadowy backdrops (not unlike the lighting in ITV’s 1979 Macbeth) so that props and actors are more prominent than the revolving set.

Having not read the book yet, I cannot comment on how much Peterson’s script follows the original text. I can say that the script follows the basic facts as I understand them. It also accomplishes the tricky problem of retelling real events while highlighting themes to make events feel interconnected. The flashback moments (especially scenes where the father, Casper ten Boom, appears on the revolving set and talks about faith) bring out images and ideas that Corrie contemplates in her narration. Thus, it feels grounded in real life but more vivid than a docudrama.

Since I never saw Peterson’s play on stage and have not read the published playscript, I can’t speak to whether he revised anything for the film. I suspect he reproduced the play script with minimal changes. The dialogue sounds more like stage dialogue than naturalistic film dialogue, but this rarely presents a problem. Some of the dialogue is witty, and there is some memorable repartee between Corrie and a German watchmaker apprentice who scorns her values. However, the wit never reaches Oscar Wilde proportions where it’s so styled you can’t imagine a real person saying it. 

Once or twice, the dialogue works toward an effect that would work great onstage but not on film. For example, when the three ten Booms discuss the underground’s request that they harbor Jews, one of them says, “But the Gestapo office is one block away!” Then they look at each other and simultaneously say, “They’ll never suspect!” It’s a good line. It’s the kind of line that works great on stage—lines designed to get a laugh, the audience responding, the actors taking in that energy and reusing it for the next big moment. On film, the audience and actors are too separated for that kind of magic to happen, so the line clunks rather than resounds. Fortunately, there are only a few moments where this happens.

All things considered, The Hiding Place is a moving piece of entertainment. The story handles the major themes—faith, bigotry, sacrifice, and forgiveness—without becoming pretentious or saccharine. Its filmmaking style handles the stage-to-cinema problem admirably, making this far more engaging than just a filmed play.

My one reservation may engender debate. The plot falls into two clear acts. In the first act, the German officer questions Corrie, while flashbacks establish her work. In the second half, she and her Bestie experience the horrors of Ravensbrück, while Corrie’s narration gives an idea of how she felt and how it informed her life after being released. The plot wraps up quickly after the Ravensbrück scenes—Corrie returns to the watch shop, reflecting on what she will do next.

All this material is good… but it takes two and a half hours to be told. I suspect the play divides this material into two acts with an intermission. Told as a continuous story, it somehow drags. Part of the problem may be that once Corrie enters Ravensbrück, viewers are in familiar territory. Concentration camp scenes have become so common that it’s hard to stage one that doesn’t feel cliché.

The larger problem is that long isn’t always better in a historical drama. Yes, the 1975 version of The Hiding Place is almost the same length (give or take 5 minutes). Schindler’s List is even longer—3 hours and 15 minutes. And yes, almost every current Hollywood movie is closer to three hours than two hours. However, more than a few critics and audiences (I recommend Natalie Jarvey’s recent piece in Vanity Fair) have argued that the trend has become tiresome.

Long runtimes particularly present a problem if the material isn’t designed for spectacle. Schindler’s List never drags, but it uses every possible trick to make the story feel epic. In contrast, The Man in the Glass Booth asks some brutal questions about the Holocaust, but the movie and the play are inherently cerebral stories—a few characters trying to understand each other. The latter movie clocks in at just under two hours and perfectly suits its runtime.

This version of The Hiding Place isn’t cerebral in the same way as The Man in the Glass Booth but is equally designed to feel intimate and small rather than epic. Peterson’s script emphasizes Corrie’s inner conflicts. The sets are minimalistic. Everything is compelling, but from the foundations upward, it’s a different kind of movie than Spielberg’s epic (or the 1975 film, for that matter). Given that, I suspect there’s a more compelling, two-hour version of The Hiding Place that loses some of the concentration camp imagery, trims a couple of the flashbacks, and makes its 120 minutes more memorable.

Pacing issues aside, I am glad to have seen this new movie of The Hiding Place. I’m also looking forward to seeing what the Rabbit Room does next.

Literary & Media Analysis