Witness
Peter Weir (1985)
The first film that Peter Weir made in the US, Witness went down well with plenty of critics and even better with audiences, in North America and around the world. Set in present-day Pennsylvania, the scenario is promising. A young Amish boy, waiting at a station with his mother for a connecting train to Philadelphia, goes to the gents, where he witnesses a murder. The murdered man is an undercover police officer. Two of his colleagues interview the boy, who can’t identify the perpetrator from an identity parade or mug shots that he’s shown but sees a newspaper clipping in a trophy case at the police station. The clipping includes a photo of another member of the Philadelphia police department, whom the boy recognises as the killer. The senior detective who interviewed the boy soon realises there’s drug-related corruption in the department all the way up to the top. The boy and his mother return to their home in rural Lancaster. After an attempt on his life by the bad cops, which leaves him with a gunshot wound, the good cop takes refuge and stays in hiding within the alien world of the Amish community.
The script (by Earl W Wallace, William Kelley and Pamela Wallace) is shallow, though, and Peter Weir’s direction heavy-handed from the start. Witness begins at an Amish funeral, that of the father of the boy who will witness the murder. The mourners’ unusual garb and manner of speaking suggest past times, but Weir then immediately puts ‘Pennsylvania, 1984’ on the screen: it would have been more effective to hold back that signpost until after the shot of an Amish pony and trap going along a road busy with motor traffic. In the story that follows, Weir’s characters must exchange more emphatically meaningful looks than there are minutes in the film (117). The widowed Rachel Lapp (Kelly McGillis) and her eight-year-old son, Samuel (Lukas Haas), are on their way to visit Rachel’s sister in Philadelphia. Although it’s supposedly the first time Samuel has ever been in the city, Rachel is surprisingly unconcerned about her son’s wandering about the station concourse and going alone to the toilets there. He must, of course, to be the sole witness to the crime committed. But that’s all that Samuel is in the story. He serves a plot purpose only: there’s no suggestion that he might have been traumatised – or that his mother would worry he’s been traumatised – by his shocking experience. Once the narrative focus switches to Rachel’s nursing detective John Book (Harrison Ford) back to health and the growing mutual attraction between them, Samuel almost disappears from the action, until Book’s showdown with his nefarious boss, police chief Schaeffer (Josef Sommer), on the farm where Rachel and Samuel live with her elderly father (Jan Rubeš).
The writing and direction of the central romance are no great shakes either – they’re designed merely to satisfy assumed audience expectations of a two-worlds-collide love story. On the night of a storm (!), Book happens to see Rachel topless as she washes; when she catches sight of him, she fearlessly presents her bare breasts to his troubled gaze. He moves away. Next morning, he tells her, ‘If we’d made love, then I couldn’t leave’ – which Book knows he must do, never mind that he could be useful to the community (he proves a dab hand at carpentry during a lengthy barn-raising sequence, earning the respect even of Rachel’s jealous suitor (Alexander Godunov)). Weir still sticks in a bit subsequently where Book and Rachel physically express their feelings for each other – a passionate embrace in the middle of a cornfield – to keep us happy. Almost needless to say, the film ignores the question of whether they might have anything in common beyond powerful sexual attraction to each other. They just play out the familiar movie phenomenon of a love that could never be. Once the public toilet murderer (Danny Glover) has himself been killed and Schaeffer has surrendered in the final shootout, John Book takes his leave of Rachel and Lancaster, and heads back to the city to solve more crime.
Harrison Ford represents that world very likeably. It’s inevitable that, in the lead, he has more meaningful looks to deliver than anyone else, but at least Ford varies them, especially Book’s incredulous little grimaces in the early stages of his Amish experience. The BFI audience I was in chuckled at the obvious bits of fish-out-of-water humour – Book disguised in Amish clothes that don’t fit, or milking a cow – but I could only hear my own laugh when Rachel makes breakfast, and Book exclaims, ‘Honey – that’s great coffee!’, TV-commercial style, baffling the hostess and her family. Harrison Ford delivers that line perfectly, and manages its aftermath equally well. Lukas Haas is good as Samuel – vivid in the opening murder scene, eccentrically introverted in the scenes that follow. As Rachel, Kelly McGillis gives a conscientious performance but registers changing emotions very deliberately. Josef Sommer isn’t good as the slippery-sinister police chief, and some of the playing in smaller parts is worse. I have to admit I was relieved when John Book’s rustic idyll was over. The Amish are decent and all that, and they pull together to help Book in the climax to the crime story, but their way of life is mildly depressing, too. The great outdoors sequences – notably that barn-raising marathon – are enlivened by the accompaniment of Maurice Jarre music, which is very agreeable, even if probably insincere.
23 April 2026