Harrison Ford plays Harrison Ford in Witness (which is a Witness)
Sorry for spoiling my overall rating.
I thought that, as the holidays are starting to ramp up, how better to celebrate Thanksgiving than with a movie about the Amish?
Witness is about an Amish boy who, on a trip to another Amish community in Baltimore, witnesses a grizzly murder in the bathroom at a Philadelphia train station. As he is the only witness to the crime, Detective John Book (Harrison Ford) is tasked with having him find the identity of the murderer. When the murderer turns out to be a person of particular importance that is connected in a very particular way, Book finds himself hiding in an Amish community, both for his own safety and to protect the only witness to the crime.
I say that Harrison Ford plays himself in this movie because… well, it really seems like he does. He has equal amounts of Fordian charm, monotone line-reads, his own particular dry humor, and his “way” with the ladies (sometimes somewhat aggressive, though much more restrained here). Additionally, he spends a good 15 minutes of the movie as a carpenter (the job he was doing before making it big as Han Solo). Unlike his roles as Indiana Jones, Han Solo, or even Decker, Ford softens his hard-edged emotional armor and conveys a much higher degree of sensitivity and emotional vulnerability than you would normally expect from him, and it is to the film’s advantage. While Book isn’t one of Ford’s more memorable characters, it is definitely one of his more honest ones.
A good degree of this is due to the very careful yet very easy direction of Peter Weir, who would go on to direct multiple actors to Academy Award nominations and wins in such excellent movies as The Dead Poet’s Society and The Truman Show… and Master and Commander – the Far Side of the World. Here he carefully balances some 80’s grit and neon with rustic timelessness seamlessly, showing both the similarities and differences between the two very different worlds Book travels through. His alert and easy direction netted Harrison Ford an Academy Award nomination, the only one he has thus received.
The look of the movie is also very astute – shot by Weir collaborator and semi-retired master DP John Seale (of Mad Max: Fury Road and Harry Potter 1 fame). The best shots are the ones where the camera is almost too close and moving in some sort of relationship to the characters, a shot that would be perfected later in The Dead Poet’s Society (if you know the shot I am thinking of, you can see the look and feel in this movie). Kudos to framing a young Viggo Mortensen perfectly in this movie – his first role and one where he has next to no lines but would lead to greater things in the future.
From a story point of view, the movie does a few things very well. One, it sidesteps the all-too-cliched “our hero learns something new about himself by reacquainting himself to a simpler lifestyle” cliché. While the elements are there, Weir provides subtle clues regarding this instead of overt exposition. A simple look of longing from Harrison Ford, a bit of a music cue from Maurice Jarre (in one of his… stranger scores). The camerawork and editing go well here – taking time to show the emotion of the scene to effective yet subtle effect.
Additionally, the tension of the Amish is not represented as a sort of return to a simpler life that Book has been craving (he hasn’t). Instead, the tension comes in the form of a critical eye – the Amish are not necessarily shown as something to aspire to, but they are also shown to have some merit. Overall, it is the contrast with the way the outsiders view them (mainly in the form of tourists) that the Amish are viewed.
The second point of interest story-wise is how tight the movie is. Elements that could very easily spiral out of control are very tightly contained. The plot itself, broken down beat-by-beat, is not complex and the characters kept to a strict limit. Part of this is because the script was based off an episode of Gunsmoke, initially expanded then cut back down. This is especially evident in the “reset to zero” nature that the movie’s ending has – while there have been some seismic changes in Book’s world, it almost feels like a sequel would not change much about Book himself.
When making Looper, Rian Johnson cited Witness as a movie that completely flips genres halfway through, and it certainly feels that way. The almost gritty Philadelphia crime drama of the first half of the movie should feel completely disconnected to the Dances with Wolves feel to the second half of the movie (which would only be improved with a hokey Harrison Ford voiceover), yet Weir pulls off the combination of the two genres seamlessly. At the same time, the movie lacks a little bit in the engagement section – a lot of the plot elements, while executed in a fresh way, feel very stale and cliché – the single mother of the boy and Harrison Ford’s relationship, for example, felt stale even in the 1980’s. And while the efficiency of storytelling and the spinning of genre in the movie are interesting (and fun to watch), there is a generic feel about the screenplay overall that holds it back from pure greatness and Harrison Ford’s best role ever.
Rating: Witness (of course)
