The barn has a number of levels, and so does the movie. Witness is at once a compelling thriller, a smoldering love story, a thoughtful study in comparative cultures, and a respectful exploration of religious community and nonviolence. It is about belonging and not-belonging, and crossing boundaries between one and the other. It is about being in a world but not of it, being an alien in another world, and coming to feel alienated in one’s own world.
It is about attraction between a man and a woman (Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis) separated by their fundamental life commitments, about the allure of the forbidden and unobtainable; it is also about a brief but powerful connection between a fatherless young boy and a childless man. Among the main cast are elderly and juvenile, male and female, pious and secular, urban and rural, honest and corrupt, jaded and innocent, peaceful and violent. If it’s not quite the world in microcosm, it’s a big chunk of it.
Witness starts among the Amish in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, amid golden cornfields and rippling grass, whitewashed farm houses and black horse-drawn buggies. Aside from an opening title identifying the year as 1984, there is little in the opening scene, a funeral for a young farmer leaving behind a widow and a young boy, to tell us we are not watching a period piece; not until later do we get a striking shot of an immense semi-trailer and a line of cars creeping along behind an Amish buggy and a trotting horse: two worlds momentarily juxtaposed, yet with nothing in common but the road under their wheels.
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