![]() Weir, though, discounts the dark side - he's in love with their simplicity. Wallace and William Kelley), a sense of both the homey virtues and the dangerous backwardness of the closed, inbred Amish community. But he's an "English," a "Yankee," and a whispering campaign grows to have her "shunned." This practice of ostracism is something besides quaint - there's a certain edge to the screenplay (by Earl W. Nursing him back to health with linseed oil salves and specially brewed teas, Rachel falls in love with Book, he with her. The corrupt constables give Book a taste of lead spooked and wounded, he gathers mom and boy and lights out for the sanctuary of Amish country. ![]() John Book (Har- rison Ford) discovers that the victim was an undercover cop murdered by other cops involved in a French Connection-style drug conspiracy. Waiting with his widowed mother Rachel (Kelly McGillis) in Philadelphia for a connecting train, Samuel (Lukas Haas), an 8-year-old Amish boy, heads for the men's room, where, peering from his stall, he witnesses a brutal murder. Showcasing no fewer than four performances, each as shaped and delicate as cut glass, "Witness" can sparkle with a rare kind of movie magic. Still, the high points make it worth the ride. A conventional doomed romance stapled onto an even more conventional cop thriller, "Witness" never hangs together and Weir's sentimental view of Amish life is enough to make you swear off egg noodles for life. In "Witness," Australian director Peter Weir brings his fascination with the clash of cultures to the States, replacing his aborigines and Indonesians with the Amish, religious separatists hidden in a sylvan Pennsylvania of dogmatic nonviolence and bygone ways.
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