Afterimages Witness

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Grain ripening in the sun and rustling in the wind. Moving through it, stately figures dressed in black, the men bearded, the women wearing long dresses. The image is out of 19th century rural life. Certainly it is not what one expects to see at the beginning of a movie that takes up, among other 20th century matters, a drug-related murder and police corruption.

Yet it is precisely the business of Witness, which is one of the most originally conceived and gracefully made suspense dramas of recent years, to work into edgy juxtaposition the representatives of two subcultures that are ordinarily mutually exclusive. Those dark figures in the fields are Amish, members of the plainest of the plain (and pacifist) religious sects. Their faith forbids them to use the paraphernalia of modern life. They work their Pennsylvania farms without benefit of electricity or the internal combustion engine, and as a result lead lives that seem to the frantic urban outsider idyllic, exemplary and very fragile. That is precisely what a young widow named Rachel (the glowing Kelly McGillis) and her son Samuel (Lukas Haas) discover when they go to visit her sister. For during a layover in Philadelphia, the little boy visits the men's room in the railroad station and witnesses a brutal murder.

The pair is taken into protective custody by Detective John Book (Harrison Ford, in a shy, gruff, well-controlled performance). But when Samuel identifies the killer as a policeman, and Book discovers that the man is part of a dope ring that includes other police officers, it is he who needs protection. Shot by the murderer, Book hides out on Rachel's farm, where his wound is healed by folk medicine. But his presence is resented by the Amish. They are kindly but stern people who understand that threats to their way of life can come in benign forms. For his part, Book suppresses his city smarts and treads as carefully around his hosts' feelings as he does around the cows in the barn. At best he and the Amish achieve tolerance.

Possibly this tone of civilized irreconcilability stems from a feeling on the part of Australian Director Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli) that he was himself a stranger in a curious corner of a strange land. But for whatever reasons, the distinguishing marks of Witness are its refusals. Book may help with a barn raising, and win respect for his carpentry, but that does not make him anyone's new best friend. Rachel may dance with him to a tune they hear on his forbidden car radio, or finally embrace him hungrily, but that does not mean that they will go off together. Young Samuel may be soberly fascinated by the detective's gun, but that does not mean he will set aside religious scruples to fire it when the rogue cops finally trace Book and invade the farm.

What Witness says is that fullscale conversion experiences are not a prerequisite to a satisfying ending, in life or in the movies. Sometimes we honor the stranger best by learning to respect his differences and then passing on, enlightened perhaps, but neither imposed upon nor imposing. There is subtlety in that thought, and elegance in the movie that mutes some of its melodramatic potential to set it forth.