The Talkies/What a Wonderful World
Podhoretz, John
THE TALKIES
WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD
by John Podhoretz
W itness is a suspense thriller about an eight-year-old boy who watches a murder being committed in a men's room.
But it isn't much of a...
...a fellow cop is responsible for the murder, and a decorated cop at that...
...But most important, he shares the sense of duty, and the need for work, that characterizes the Amish...
...when Samuel has to go off to the men's room, the lives of all the members of the Lapp family are changed forever...
...Quickly he glances over at Book, engrossed in conversation with someone...
...The Amish here are rather like regular guys who happen to dress funny...
...If he was bad," Samuel replies...
...Later, Book and the Amish journey into town, and are harassed by a couple of teenaged punks who taunt them and humiliatingly smear ice-cream on the face of one young, strong Amishman who does nothing...
...For Book is, spiritually at least, Samuel's true father, and it is through the boy that he comes first to be protected by the Amish and subsequently to protect them...
...Samuel begins to point his finger at a photograph of a Lieutenant McFee...
...For Samuel, the little boy, is Amish, and he witnesses the murder during the first trip he has ever taken out of the Lancaster County enclave that is home to the Pennsylvania Dutch...
...You must live by our laws," she tells him, and he nods, not bothering to point out that she has done him an injustice...
...they tend to shoot at people in public places with quite a few onlookers about...
...The white cop, John Book (Harrison Ford), asks Samuel what the murderer looked like...
...Samuel locks the stall door and stands on one of the toilets so that the murderer will not see his feet...
...It is only a freak of train scheduling that strands mother and son in the Philadelphia station for three hours...
...Be careful out there among the English," Samuel's grandfather Eli apprehensively tells Samuel's mother, Rachel (Kelly McGillis), as she hoists her son onto the silver-chrome Amtrak train that will take them to Philadelphia and then on to Baltimore, where Rachel's sister lives...
...He is not very good at it himself, she is terribly awkward-it is romance at its most plain...
...Book believes in the use of force for a reason...
...The bond between them is forged at precisely the moment that Samuel fingers the killer...
...but it is only implicit, almost a half-hearted throwaway...
...and one gets the feeling that they will assent to this form of transport only because it existed in the nineteenth century, around the moment that the Amish froze themselves in time...
...clever boy that he is, he has scurried under the aperture and has run into the next stall...
...It's loaded," he says, empties the bullets out of it, and hands it back for the little boy to examine...
...You look very plain," Rachel says approvingly as she dresses Book up in her late husband's clothing...
...His grandfather, Eli, sits him down, the gun on a table before them...
...Book tells him it's over...
...one of them actually hands his gun over to the heroes out of shame...
...When next we see Samuel, he is being interrogated by two policemen, one white and one black...
...He is unmarried because he has never been in love, and he takes a parental interest in his sister's children because they are fatherless...
...Rachel, just widowed, gravely nods her assent...
...The movie takes a bum turn later on by suggesting that they have broken this rule, and have gone to bed...
...And neither one truly entertains the idea that they could actually make a life together...
...It does not make the easy, cheap point that the Amish are better than Book, but it does take the Amish (and their philosophy) seriously...
...And as Samuel demonstrates, even a little Amish child can be as keen about protecting himself as a modern eight-year-old who gets tips on how to avoid killers by watching movies like Witness...
...He has very little life apart from his job...
...He lives quite easily among them, and is one of the most productive workers during a barn-raising...
...So these are serious people, Book and the Amish...
...Rachel walks in on them, sends Samuel out of the room, and makes clear to Book that she is very unhappy...
...If we slept together," Book says at one point, "I'd have to stay or you'd have to leave...
...After committing the deed, the murderer realizes that there may be someone else in there...
...Book reads the meaning in Samuel's eyes, and goes over to him...
...Samuel's wish to handle Book's gun is another sign of the bond between them, and Samuel himself makes the case for the use of force in a way that Book never could...
...The Amish are pacifists, refuse to serve in wars, refuse to own guns...
...He takes her around the waist and teaches her how to dance...
...Plainness is the greatest virtue to the Amish...
...There is a scene in which Book grabs his gun from Samuel's hand...
...But how would you know he was bad...
...plot is an almost magical tale of how two wildly inimical ways of life can form an almost easy alliance...
...Nor does it have the standard cathartic thriller conclusion, with the bad guys getting it in the teeth...
...Witness does not resolve the differences between Book and the Amish...
...Book gets off the carriage to settle accounts, but Eli stops him...
...He has been looking through mug shots of Philadelphia's worst, without finding anyone resembling the killer...
...Samuel rushes into a stall when the murderer and his victim enter the men's room, and quickly reveals himself to be far less naive than we would suppose from his antiquated dress and doe's eyes...
...I can see what he does," Samuel responds simply...
...he is a moral man whose morality necessarily includes the need for a gun...
...Astonishingly, however, the movie never tries to convince us that because of their rejection of the modern world, the Amish are superior to us...
...Not a word is spoken during the scene...
...This unnerves Schaeffer, who had once upon a time been Book's mentor...
...Eli asks whether Samuel would ever use the gun on anyone...
...For hanging very loosely upon its suspense John Podhoretz is critic-at-large and Capital Life editor of the Washington Times...
...He seems, in an unself-righteous way, to believe that his mission is to get the bad guys...
...The murderer tries the door, finds it locked, and kicks it in, only Samuel is no longer there...
...Yes, but it's mine," Book says, and proceeds to teach the punks a lesson in manners...
...They tell each other dirty jokes, and they are not so much religiose as extremely businesslike about their religion...
...Rachel is a radiant young woman, supple and dark blonde, but she gets herself up in the most unflattering bonnets and thick dresses, and does not know how to move gracefully...
...And Schaeffer meekly hands over his gun...
...We realize from this that he has probably never before seen a black man...
...the communication is all by glance and gesture...
...In spite of-or even because of- these nominal failings, Witness is one of the best films of the past decade...
...But it isn't much of a thriller...
...This idea has long been a staple of counterculture moviemaking, and Peter Weir, the director of Witness, has up to this point been one of its strongest proponents...
...Can you see into his heart...
...He holds the boy...
...The Amish do not object when Book finds it necessary to trap one of the killers in a corn crib and suffocate him, and the Amish come to Book's and Rachel's aid when Schaef-fer, the corrupt police captain who is the ringleader of the gang, takes Rachel hostage in a last-ditch effort to save his skin...
...These are the two different faces of the Amish...
...He wanders away from Book's desk, across the precinct room, to a display case full of trophies and news stories praising Philadelphia policemen...
...it connotes a lack of vanity, and a desire to rid oneself of sexual desire and desirability...
...But it is the introduction of the tough Philadelphia cop John Book into the world of the Amish that sets the tone of the film...
...Nor does it have a particularly believable set of villains...
...The Amish gather around and stand silently, all of them witnesses now...
...He does look plain, and he is plain in the Amish way...
...But this is where he and the Amish part ways...
...In the film's most extraordinary sequence, Book is fixing his car in the barn, Rachel watching, when the car radio begins playing the old Sam Cooke song "What a Wonderful World...
...On the one hand, they are almost completely ignorant, willfully so, about the modern world...
...the Amish are pacifists for a reason, and recognize that their views make it imperative that they reject the modern world and all its conveniences...
...The concessions they make to it are tiny, and quite funny...
...They will take trains, but almost resentfully...
...Book grabs the finger and brings the boy's hand down...
...Nor does it portray Book as some kind of Dirty Harry...
...Like him," Samuel says pointing to the black cop...
...Book looks ridiculous in the clothing (it is, among other things, two sizes too small for him), but Rachel is correct...
...Book is a homicide detective, complete with pistol...
...As Book finally leaves the Lapps forever, Eli waves to him and imparts the familiar caution: "Be careful out there among the English...
...Enough," he says...
...As circumstances develop, Book and the Lapps find themselves in great danger, and he takes them back to their farm and stays with them, to hide himself in the nineteenth century...
...It is not our way," Eli says...
...In his The Last Wave, set in Australia, the primitive Aborigines possess not only the wisdom of the ages, but a profound knowledge of the supernatural that puts the supposedly "advanced" Western civilization to shame...
...In The Year of Living Dangerously, set in Jakarta, a half-Western, half-Oriental dwarf controls the lives of those Westerners he loves as easily as he manipulates the wooden shadow puppets of Indonesia...
...we find out who the murderers are about twenty minutes into the action...
...And as all of this is proceeding, he and Rachel are falling in love...
...their horsedrawn carriages slow 18-wheel trucks and sports cars to a crawl, and bear on their back the high-tech triangular orange reflector that signifies a slow-moving vehicle...
...At the film's end, the two have come to respect each other enough that they work in concert to defeat the villains...
...THE TALKIES WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD by John Podhoretz W itness is a suspense thriller about an eight-year-old boy who watches a murder being committed in a men's room...
Vol. 18 • May 1985 • No. 5
