![]() Two men enter while one man stands in front of the mirror, the two men slit the throat of the man, and as his body drops to the floor, we see Samuel hiding in a stall, viewing the horror through the slit in the door. Haas is quite marvelous here, never more so when his innocence is shattered when he sees a murder take place in a public restroom. While you are told it’s Samuel’s first trip on a train, the wonder in the boy’s expression as he makes his way through the Philadelphia station makes that fact clear enough. A woman named Rachel (a luminous Kelly McGillis) has just been widowed and without any overt exposition, we meet her young son Samuel (Lukas Haas in one of the truly great child performances), her father Eli (Jan Rubes), and Daniel (Alexander Godunov) a man who wishes to comfort Rachel, but would also clearly like to be her next husband.Īfter the funeral, Rachel and Samuel go to the train station to visit family in Baltimore in the hopes the trip will stifle their grief. The opening ten minutes plus drops us right into the lives of an Amish community. I suppose the best way to start in talking about Witness is to go to the start. It never occurred to me that if both of them loved a film that there would be any outliers. I was recently surprised to learn that despite winning two Oscars (for original screenplay and film editing) being nominated for a total of eight (including Harrison Ford’s only Oscar nomination ever, for lead actor), and being a sizable sleeper hit, not all critics were taken with the film at the time of its release.Īs I recently learned from Janet Maslin (the great former film critic for the New York Times) in a post of hers on social media, her predecessor as the main critic for the Times, Vincent Canby, dismissed the film as “pretty, but not much fun.” While Maslin didn’t name other negative reviewers in her post as she referred to the film’s initially mixed critical response, she did point out that Siskel and Ebert were two of the few to recognize Witness as an instant classic, which explains why my assumptions about the film’s reception were set in stone: back in 1985, the only two film critics who existed for me were Gene and Roger. While those elements are inarguably in play, this is one of those movies that falls under the category covered by Roger Ebert’s quote, “It’s not what a movie’s about, it’s how it is about it.”Īnd as directed by the great Australian filmmaker, Peter Weir ( Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously, Fearless, Dead Poets Society, Master and Commande r), Witness “is about it” in ways that few might expect from its basic description. ![]() On the surface, Witness looks like a mash-up of two tropes: the good cop protecting an eye-witness from danger, and a fish out of water flick about a man forced to assimilate with another culture.
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