Movie break: American cheese on white bread, with mayo, for a night you don’t want to think much: Witness (1985)

I remember seeing this one when it was out in theaters, when naturally a new release has an edge, or you see a state-of-the-art quality if it isn’t exactly a form-breaking work. Today, of course, this film is an old favorite among some viewers, though it may seem dated in some ways: it’s good comfort food, a Fluffernutter sandwich, Velveeta on white bread, or a big snack of some kids’ string cheese—it’s a good film to watch if you don’t want to think too much, and do want to feel something nice amid suspense and a certain “study” quality about an admirably Luddite culture, the Amish.

The DVD version I saw had a surprisingly low-resolution, analog-ish feel to it, which seems OK for this movie: it seems like you take a trip back to 1985 to see it, as if Reagan is in office, and the picture quality goes well with the tasty cinematography, which I’ll talk about later.

The DVD also has compulsory-viewing previews for a range of things, including other comfort foods (depending on your taste): there is a box set of movies starring John Wayne (yes, that fellow born Marion Morrison; yesterday’s big star and today’s homely lummox, as sturdy and enlightening as a telephone pole; sort of looks like Lyndon Johnson, except he had half the I.Q. of LBJ); and an apparent set of the TV show MacGyver, a 1980s action hero played by an inoffensive-looking sort—the hero seems to have the improvising skills of an Eagle Scout. So Witness comes packaged as if for people who’ve (per Paul Simon in about 1968) “all gone to look for America,” and sometimes that’s not such a bad thing.

Witness may seem so familiar to people already—or, for those who haven’t seen it yet, is so accessible—that the idea of explaining it is like explaining ginger ale: there’s no need; if you feel a desire to try it out, go ahead.

Witness and its extras give a fulsome story

The DVD contains just about all you could want in terms of a making-of documentary, which is broken down into five parts (viewable all together or separately). Harrison Ford, of course, is the main star as the police operative John Book who finds that a small Amish boy, Samuel Lapp, has witnessed a brutal murder in a train station bathroom in Philadelphia while he and his mother have been waiting to take the train to visit a relative in Baltimore. After Book has had the boy look at a police lineup to try to identify the killer, as well as be shown a suspect from a bar, back in the police station the boy points to a picture, of a high-ranking police staffer, Narcotics Officer McFee, who, as we know from his previously seen Danny Glover face, is the killer.

As John Book later infers in a powwow with his boss, Paul Schaeffer, McFee was in on the past theft of a massive amount of chemical (“P2P”) usable for production of speed, the illegal drug. Quickly, amid tautly suspensive modern-world plot developments including Book’s being shot by McFee in a parking garage, Book takes the boy and his mother back to their Amish home area in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he ends up needing to hide out himself, especially when his injury makes him so sick he drives his car into a birdhouse.

Book then starts to be educated into the modest and old-time ways of the Amish as he lives within the household of the boy, with mother Rachel Lapp, played by Kelly McGillis, who would later star with Tom Cruise in Top Gun (1986). There is also Rachel’s father, with lengthy old-time beard, played by Jan Rubes, an opera singer from Toronto. Book makes an uneasy peace with trying to live in the Amish village, occasionally making an escape to a local village to make a discreet phone call to his colleague in the city (Sergeant Carter) to keep on top of the police-honcho/drugs/murder mess, which also involves Schaeffer, his own previously trusted superior, played by Josef Sommer, who played one of the congressional committeemen near the end of the film The Front (1976). Eventually Book finds, or expects—in the wake of discovering that Carter has been killed—that the police heavies are coming to the Amish village to get him, and a final suspenseful, violence-promised showdown shapes the end of the movie.

As I’ve roughly described this, this may all seem rather an awkward juxtaposition of two worlds, and potentially a clash of very different tones, with a certain sentimentality mixed in—Book, as it happens, falls into a forbidden love with Rachel Lapp, which they have to be comfortable with letting go when he finally leaves the Amish village.

Film developers had a clear approach

Director Peter Weir, an Australian with limited experience at the time in helming American films (while he impressed Feldman and Ford with his work on The Year of Living Dangerously [1982]), speaks often in the making-of doc, and brings out that his concern about making the film was regarding details and tone, as well as the originally scripted ending’s being not quite right. Producer Edward S. Feldman was not the first to deal with the script, which when he got it he felt was too long, but he worked hard enough (with new writers) to trim and rework the script, get Harrison Ford attached, and finally tap Weir, who as Ford says brought a value to the film with his outsider’s view of America.

Ford himself, who was a major star at the time—which presumably Feldman felt added marketing heft—suggests he wanted to work on a film that showed he wasn’t merely a product of Steven Spielberg (with the Indiana Jones films) and George Lucas (with Star Wars). With his slanted smile and somewhat rugged WASPy good looks and dry sense of humor, he seemed ideal to play the worldly-wise but potentially paternal (to an Amish boy) policeman. (Interestingly, according to his Wikipedia biography, Ford on his father’s side is Irish and German and on his mother’s side Byelorussian Jewish. This leaves him with an appearance, I think, that is slightly hard to figure out as to ethnicity but generally seems like a “sturdy, inoffensive American sort.”) He also had (and has) a middle-of-the-road Everyman sort of personality—Feldman compares him (as qualifying for the film) to Gary Cooper; and of course Ford’s overall flavor was known to be such that even Stanley Kubrick, it is said, gave the surname “Harford” to the upscale New York couple focused on in his Eyes Wide Shut (1999) in order to echo a sort of Harrison Ford quality.

Ford, for his part, saw Witness’s script as “terrific” for its juxtaposing an old and new world as well as a “difficult” love story.

Craft of the film makes it smooth

Other features of the film include the camera work of John Seale, for which he got award nominations (such as an Oscar nomination) and actually won an award from the Australian Cinematographers Society. He says he moved fast through his work, including with the lighting, getting numerous alternate shots, multiple takes, and such, which would give the editor more “options” to work with. This perhaps explains why the film, with its numerous short shots of details and such, thus has an energetic-yet-precise feel, while there is also a placid or a familiar quality to a lot of the world it shows. Seale also remarks on certain shots—such as the Amish elders gathered at John Book’s bed—being composed and lit to imitate Vermeer (or other 1600s Dutch) paintings.

The music was composed by Maurice Jarre, and also received award nominations (including for an Oscar) and a win (from BAFTA). Its being “orchestrated” on synthesizers, even while playing a sort of classical-flavored theme, was typical for the 1980s (budget was apparently a concern for this film, and of course orchestras cost money), but it somehow seems right for this film.

Patti LuPone, who had done stage work and TV, is on hand as Book’s sister (somehow no critics complain that LuPone seems quite Italian, and Ford a little too WASPy, to be brother and sister). Alexander Godunov, a Russian defector and ballet dancer, provides his limited-acting-but-charming quality as the Amish man, Daniel Hochleitner, who is better suited to being Rachel’s future mate than John Book. And even Viggo Mortensen has a small role as the Godunov character’s younger brother.

On the realism front: How about that generic white New Wave music in the Black bar? (Prince was big by then; why not at least him?...)

Principals sum the film’s value

Ford remarks at the end of the doc that one value of the film is its especially inviting opportunity for the audience to empathize with characters. Ford himself, as he wouldn’t say in so many words, is an important asset to it in this regard; not a brilliantly expressive actor, he seems as sturdy and trustworthy as an old Buick and has something of the same can-do relatability of Tom Cruise, except with a sort of edgy baby boomer capacity for sardonic attitude. And Ford knows some carpentry (while Cruise can do things like scale up the side of a skyscraper—showing different generations’ priorities).

This film does seem like feel-good material that also seems like a star vehicle of its time, and yet it has remained a sort of favorite—“cult film” isn’t the right word for this one—after all these years.

Director Weir, after having told how earnestly he approached making the film, shows he doesn’t have flighty illusions about it. He says, not disparagingly, that it is a “slight, light film” and—in a phrase I’m not sure I got right—it’s like “wine to the drunk in the season,” or maybe he said “wine to be drunk in the season”: either will do here, I think. But, he’s quick to admit, it’s had a longtime appeal because of the product of its elements that make it “soothing,” along with all else. I would agree.

Note on McGillis

Kelly McGillis turned out, over the long term, not to have an enormous movie-acting career. A newspaper article on her within the past few years (it may have been in The Star-Ledger, the main newspaper in New Jersey) showed she’d conquered a substance-abuse problem, had a steady relationship with a lesbian partner, has had a religious life, and has been raising children. She also does occasional acting (on stage only? Trying to remember). She seems in a good place now, which seems fitting for someone who in 1984, when filming Witness, was good for her role in terms of, as the making-of doc conveys, being womanly and attractive without being overtly sexual—seeming simply decent while still posing a not-surprising love interest for John Book. She says in heartfelt comments in the DVD doc that the film was a “gift” for her, for which she shows deep appreciation, while she also notes that it “certainly set the bar pretty friggin’ high in terms of” what came afterward in her career—Top Gun excluded, perhaps—and what the industry is like (can’t blame her for that assessment). Her Wikipedia bio has some interesting info, some of it perhaps updating what I read in the news article a couple years ago.