Witness (Special Collector's Edition) dvd movie.|
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List Price: $12.98 Our Price: $9.99 You Save: $2.99 Features • Collector's Edition • Color • Dolby • DVD-Video • Special Edition • Subtitled • Widescreen • NTSC In Theaters : 08 February, 1985 DVD Release : 23 August, 2005 |
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Witness (Special Collector's Edition) description When Samuel (Lukas Haas), a young Amish boy traveling with his mother Rachel (Kelly McGillis), witnesses the murder of a police officer in a public restroom, he and his mother become the temporary wards of John Book (Harrison Ford), a detective who's been assigned to solve the crime. After suspect lineups and mug-shot books yield nothing, Samuel, in the most memorable scene of the film, recognizes the murderer as a narcotics agent whose picture he sees in the precinct. Once Book realizes that the police chief is in on it, too, he whisks Samuel and Rachel back home to Amish country, where he himself goes into hiding as a plain Amish man. The juxtaposition between the life of the Amish and the violence of inner-city police corruption work surprisingly well for the story, and Kelly McGillis as the falling in love widow gives an almost perfect performance. Directed by Peter Weir, the film is extremely successful in drawing the viewer into its world and, accordingly, is immensely entertaining. The only thing that mars its polish is the one-dimensional, almost cartoonish handling of the upper-echelon police corruption--a subtler, more realistic treatment of this aspect of the story would have rendered the film near perfect. --James McGrath |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | where he belongs |
| Harrison Ford shines in this lingering over the close-quarter differences between Pennsylvania's Amish people and the 'English' life that by contrast seems so rude in this 1985 screen gem. Yet twenty-two years later, it is the young Kelly McGillis who nearly melts the screen with this early performance as Rachel, the Amish widow who takes in Harrison's 'John Book' and grows into love with a fugitive from 'the city' whose own heart grows entwined with the Amish way.
Although the Amish did not like this film (it *is* a film), it remains as a deeply moving tribute to their chosen, peaceful way. Perhaps it is the finest thing we 'English'--this reviewer grew up in Pennsylvania with the Amish as his neighbors--can offer them. Not that they were asking for recognition. Director Peter Weir caught them doing what they do best, going about the business of keeping peace and making the earth grow its greenest things. The occasional caricature that creeps in clumsily elevates the men and women it seeks to honor rather than reducing them to its dimensional poverty. The Amish are not heroes and do not play that role particularly well on the wide screen (the actors of are course not Amish men and women). They are rather people who have from within community made a stark choice and chosen to celebrate both its limitations and the world it opens up to them. Weir, Ford, McGinnis et al. did well to freeze-frame that choice as one that saved the life of a self-sufficient Baltimore policemen who stumbled upon corruption that made him a marked man in the city. It is a most moving still. The film was uncanny in its capacity, in the end, to mark the Amish off in the most authentic way: not by sneering at their simplicity of style and rejection of 'fashion'. Rather, as recent history has provided grim occasion for us to observe, the Amish are distinguished by the grace that they do not kill. And, when bloodied, they say the damndest thing: 'We forgive'. Witness indeed. And a superb movie. |
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