Well, it’s a partial win for the blog this week, as I’m actually reviewing a movie that I watched over the weekend, but it’s also not exactly a buzzy or remotely current one that’s likely to get very many clicks. Witness is a 1985 thriller starring Harrison Ford (post-Raiders, post-Star Wars, and post-Blade Runner, but pre-Fugitive, for those referencing their Harry Ford flowcharts), nominated in that year for both Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture, along with a slew of others, including Ford’s only Oscar nomination. Perhaps most importantly, though, it’s free to stream on Amazon Prime, so if you want to watch before reading the rest of this, click away now and go put it on, even if you’re in the middle of work or something. It’s not my fault if you get fired.
While the Shining-esque performance of Lukas Haas certainly isn’t bad, his largely dialogue-free performance in the early going will have you desperate for some Harrison Ford (given that he doesn’t show up until like 20+ minutes in).
In my continued research into what makes screenplays great, or at least good, Witness is a common citation for a lot of writers and cinematic pundits when it comes to a sterling script, especially when it comes to structure, and for the most part that comes through, if only in the macro-sense. The plot has certainly been done before (although it’s treated slightly different here – more on that later), but the beats it needs to hit are hit full-force and with the assistance of solid tension-building, especially in the film’s climactic sequence. The humor, while certainly present, shows up at unexpected times, and the general dearth of fish-out-of-water brand humor – a brand of humor that I was fully expecting, and which therefore promised to be less funny – had me pleasantly surprised. There are not one but two easily defined character arcs, and if anything, the secondary character’s (Rachel’s) is more profound, which had me frustrated with its minimization towards the end. In general, the ending was the main source of slip-ups in my book, with a final showdown that I don’t even know what the script looked like for (it was pretty much just a lot of frantic screaming and gun-waving with a weird fizzle at the end), and a culmination of the romantic subplot that apparently supplanted ten pages of dialogue with Harrison Ford sharing a few silent longing looks with his acting partner before simply walking away. Reportedly, this happened because he was sick that day. Wild.
The romantic subplot fell flat for me, but damn if my guy Harry doesn’t look downright fetching in that plain straw hat, and Kelly McGillis knows it.
But even now, 35 years later, what you show up for – at least if you’re me – is mid-1980’s Harrison Ford, and boy do you get him. When it comes to the main plotline (the crime story) specifically, Ford is pretty magnetic, piecing together a fairly classic dirty-cop mystery with surprising speed (albeit with the help of a material witness in Lukas Haas’ young Amish Samuel). This is making no mention of the best scene in the movie, though, in which he beats up a crew of small-town jerks who apparently think that there’s not much better to do on a summer day in Pennsylvania than mess with people whose entire belief system relies upon turning the other cheek by…smearing vanilla ice cream on their cheeks. And when good old Harry Ford brusquely climbs out of his horse-drawn carriage and rains a few well-placed blows down on an unsuspecting punk who thinks he’s just toying with another Mennonite, it’s pretty gleeful. In terms of non-violent territory, Ford’s romantic foil is Kelly McGillis, who would just a year later go on to star alongside Tom Cruise in a little movie called Top Gun, here playing Samuel’s recently widowed but down-for-a-roll-in-the-hay-with-Harry-Ford mother Rachel. Also making first or early appearances in what would generally be considered successful film careers are Danny Glover (Lethal Weapon), Alexander Godunov (Die Hard), and Viggo Mortensen (The Lord of the Rings). In general, it seems like director Peter Weir and his casting director Dianne Crittenden were on the ball, or ahead of the game, or some such sports-related metaphor.
A good old-fashioned Amish beatdown, complete with incredulous little girl bystander.
On top of great casting, and great structure, and in spite of the issues that I’ve already mentioned having with the general lack of dialogue in crucial moments, I think the best thing about Witness is its premise, which is probably something I should have started with in retrospect. As I’ve already said, the plot of Witness – one in which a cop hides from the law to fight dirty cops, and falls in love with someone he’s trying to protect in the process – has been done before, and if anything is pedestrian, but what makes the story interesting here is the world in which it takes place, to the point that the designing principle of the story (what John Truby calls the overall story strategy stated in one line) is the setting. Anything interesting that happens within what’s frankly a hackneyed storyline happens as a direct consequence of the, well, Amish elements of the story, and the Amish country is what manages to – through the force of will of its inhabitants, its rural quality, or its overall simplification of life – expose the weaknesses in the hero and drive him towards the moral self-revelation that allows him to ultimately win the day. Detective Book (which, by the way, what a ridiculous name for a character) beats his opponents because he has earned the trust of the Amish people who come to his aid, and he has done so through (at least in some small way) embracing their way of life, if only temporarily. That’s not to say he turns the other cheek, though – if anything, he does the opposite, but he looks awfully plain doing it.
Detective Book going with a wild 6+ buttons unbuttoned look in the film’s climax, which has a strong grip on character/character arc but a weak grip on plausibility and non-shouted dialogue.
I think in 2020 Witness probably suffers from a few things, ranging from things as simple and vague as “in a decent number of ways, it didn’t age particularly well” to things like how well it measures up to future films it could have never predicted (I’m mainly talking about The Fugitive, which to me is a superior film). In terms of Harrison Ford movies, you could do better, even if it means returning to the tried and true characters he’s known for, but you could also do a whole lot worse. On top of that, if you’re in the mood to watch a movie while asking yourself questions about how the heck Amish people manage to like, live their lives, then this may well be the film for you.
Tuesdays with Cory 