Having slammed my idol Harrison's latest movie in the last entry, I feel I must now redeem myself, or at least use it as an excuse to rave about some of his underrated films. Well, the first one we'll be looking at is hardly underrated, having gotten HF an Oscar nomination, quite remarkable for a guy just coming off the success of two major popcorn franchises. Having appeared the previous year in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as the invincible archaeologist, it is a comment on his own versatility and the popular audience's occasional intellectual flexibility - yes, the film industry is certainly a social laboratory - that Witness, perhaps the most realistic cop thriller ever made, and one in which HF plays a highly vulnerable police officer, could gain acceptance.
As I've often said, the word "realistic" gets thrown around a lot these days to describe any film or work where characters don't use magic or have special powers, and sometimes even supernatural stories are considered "realistic" if, say, characters talk on cell phones or we are given some other reminder of the mundane world with which we identify. Witness however unfolds much more like a police case gone wrong might conceivably happen in our world. We are not given a shootout with bullets flying everywhere and a hero miraculously escaping and managing to kill every one of his assailants. We are shown a confrontation between the hero and one man in which the hero is shot, leading to his wound becoming more serious and his convalescing on the brink of death for days. Then at the end he again does not confront an army, instead a mere three men. He nails one by having the much greater upper hand, he successfully gets the drop on the second, and then the third loses his nerve. Ford's survival is plausible.
Don't get me wrong. There's no one who enjoys fantastical entertainment more than I. And yes, I understand that some obey a kind of telegraphed internal logic which makes them more convincing. I get that. But if you want to talk about a cop drama where it is actually believable in almost every sense, Witness is the one. Bullit might stand up to that acid test, but even The French Connection starts to look pretty splashy, though what film buff would want to live without that great chase scene? Not I.
That's just an opening to the main topic, this being the first in HF's "American Out of His Element" Trilogy, of which The Mosquito Coast and Frantic comprise the remaining parts. Witness comes at that theme from a good introductory slant, in terms of the character Ford is playing. John Book's values are as simple and straightforward as his name. He goes through life somewhat unconsciously, in the sense that he has received the sense of what is right and wrong from his upbringing, presumably, and enacts those values as best he can within the police force, probably without much reflection. His tragic flaw, in fact, ends up being a certain qualified optimism about the other police officers. When he discovers that another cop, played menacingly by Danny Glover, is corrupt, he is not very surprised, but he does not for a moment suspect the same corruption in his mentor and friend, a superior officer who it turns out is the plot's ringleader.
Despite his basic optimism, Book is quite familiar with the sleazier side of urban America. He has street smarts. He realizes all is not paradise, but clearly feels his own actions on American soil can help to solve the problems, in contrast with Allie Fox of The Mosquito Coast who will feel it's hopeless. That is why, when the action of the story brings him to a small Amish village where he must hide out, Angel and the Badman-style, we can sense he would like to leave the idyllic calm to go back to his urban life, such as it is. He takes the bad of the USA with the good.
Witness is a wonderful movie, but not flawless. I am always puzzled by the scene early on when Book grabs a suspect and, for identification purposes, pushes his face against the window of the car where the "witness" Lukas Haas is sitting in clear view of the suspect. I choose to believe the window is more tinted than it appears and Haas is not visible from the outside. I also never need the portions where Ford and Amish girl Kelly McGillis are finally unable to resist the compelling passion of their passionate desires and run passionately into each others' passionate embrace. It would be the same, and a possibly better, movie without that scene. Much more interesting to me is the earlier scene where Book gets the radio in his car working and they dance to a Sam Cooke song which lyrically works as an anthem for Book's basic nature. I am more intrigued by the fact that this Amish woman catches heat from Jan Rubes' authoritarian father figure for simply dancing to music; after that, the idea that premarital sex is also forbidden is not exactly a barn burner. But speaking of barns, the other classic scene is the barn raising, which gives us an idea of how the Amish community cooperates; and in which Book likely begins to see a side of the village that he, much to his surprise, can identify with. He likes things that work, but lurking behind this idyll is the fact that no community on this earth is truly safe, as the climax will demonstrate. It is a great strength of Witness that it neither condemns nor idealizes the Amish way of life, but takes a very balanced approach.
On a final note, I have read elsewhere it cited as a flaw that the boy Samuel does not appear to react much to having witnessed a murder. I reject this as being a flaw, because his seeming lack of a reaction is likely due, at least in part, to his restrained Amish conditioning. Someone raised in more conventional Western society would understandably go into histrionics, but how can we say how someone who can not even really understand what murder is would react? Many children are known to go blank, outwardly, after witnessing this type of event. The problems surface years later. It is difficult to say what he goes through internally, but to me, when he is shown first of all being intrigued by Book's gun, and then his chilling confession to Jan Rubes about how he would like to punish bad men, it is demonstrated that he has gone through a process. He is quite disturbed, he just doesn't show it through most of the film.
The last shot is of Book's car driving over a hill, out of the Amish village, back to America as he knows it. All three films in the trilogy will end with a similar scene, a vehicle taking its traumatized occupants back to familiarity.
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