Review of Witness (1985) by Macdara C — 05 Aug 2010

"Witness" is a time travel romance without time travel: that's what the Amish are there for, isn't it? What the film is interested in, is creating an excuse for a gritty but handsome city cop (Harrison Ford) to lodge with a young, attractive Amish widow (Kelly McGillis) and get her so much in love that she dances to Sam Cooke's "Wonderful World", loses her bonnet and even shows her breasts to him, in what is probably supposed to be a "tasteful" seduction scene.

That a little Amish boy is the witness to a brutal murder which leads to the uncovering a police corruption case is a bit of a pretext. The little boy even tends to drift out of the story, to the point that I even forgot about him for a while. Kelly McGillis never feels like his mom anyway (I don't even think that's what Amish moms are like) and I thought it was a little too convenient for her to have an only child: one was needed for the script to work, but a large family would probably have made her less sexy.

I watched this film because of a recent curiosity about Amish culture (aroused by the documentary "Amish: The World's Squarest Teenagers") and because "Picnic at Hanging Rock" gave me some appreciation for Peter Weir's filmmaking. As the film was mentioned on the "Amish Studies" website, I expected it to be rather reliable as a portrayal of Amish life. All I can say is that McGillis's character was obviously a little more laid back than the female teenagers in the documentary, and that the religious aspects of the culture are almost totally ignored. There are no prayer meetings, graces are silent, biblical references are scant, and I'm not sure I heard the word God even once. McGillis also behaves a little too much like a rebellious teenager, not caring about what the community says of her fraternising with the English stranger, showing disrespect to her father, and obviously having no strong objection to extramarital sex, not even within a few days after her husband's death.

"Witness" is a bit problematic as a family film, which I originally thought it was. In addition to McGillis baring her breasts, there are a few uses of the F-word, and some violence, including a man's throat being slit, and a hooligan being brutally hit in the face by Harrison Ford's character.

Maurice Jarre's synthesizer music is rather mediocre and even if I remember already disliking it in the eighties (when I used to listen to a lot of film music), it has not aged well, and tends to make the film sound more dated than it looks.

I'm sure the title of the film has a double meaning. It probably also refers to the Amish "witnessing" to their values. And in addition to the love story, the film is structured around the antithesis between the violence of Ford's character and his world, and the total pacifism of the Amish. What it seems to be saying is that both violence and non-violence "work", though each has its costs, and that they work even better together. The moral, in other words, just like the love story, straddles the fence.