Witness movie review & film summary (1985)
An Amish man dies. His widow and young son leave on a train journey. In the train station in Philadelphia, the little boy witnesses a murder. Harrison Ford plays the tough big city detective who gets assigned to the case. He stages lineups hoping the kid can spot the murderer. He shows the kid mug shots. Then it turns out that the police department itself is implicated in the killing. Ford is nearly murdered in an ambush. His life and the lives of the widow and her son are in immediate danger. He manages to drive them all back to the Amish lands of Pennsylvania before collapsing from loss of blood.
And it's at this point, really, that the movie begins. Up until the return to Pennsylvania, "Witness" has been a slick, superior thriller. Now it turns into an intelligent and perceptive love story. It's not one of those romances where the man and woman fall into each other's arms because their hormones are programmed that way. It's about two independent, complicated people who begin to love each other because they have shared danger, they work well together, they respect each other - and because their physical attraction for each other is so strong it almost becomes another character in the movie.
"Witness" was directed by Peter Weir, the gifted Australian director of "The Year of Living Dangerously." He has a strong and sure feeling for places, for the land, for the way that people build their self-regard by the way they do their work.
In the whole middle section of this movie, he shows the man from the city and the simple Amish women within the context of the Amish community. It is masterful filmmaking, The thriller elements alone would command our attention. The love story by itself would be exciting. The ways of life in the Amish community are so well observed that they have a documentary feel. But all three elements work together so well that something organic is happening here; we're inside this story.
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