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TV & Film

Witness

Hemal Jhaveri July 11, 2023

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This week on Ten Movies:

If you’re keen on unspoken but palpable yearning, ‘Witness’ will be right up your alley. If, on the other hand, you enjoy things happening, this may not be the movie for you.

In ‘Witness’, the first of Harrison Ford’s two mid-80s outings with director Peter Weir, our hero plays a gritty Philadelphia detective who has to hole up at a remote farmstead in Amish country and spend most of the movie gazing longingly at Kelly McGillis. He’s doing this because Kelly McGillis’s impossibly wide-eyed son witnessed a murder and they have to stay off the grid so the corrupt cops don’t find them.

Eventually they do, of course, and there’s some gunplay and what-not, but most of the movie is restrained to the point of placidity. There is, no joke, a 20+ minute scene where all the characters raise a barn.

But Brian and Hemal agreed that the barn-raising scene was actually kind of great – and they liked the movie’s perspective on violence: despite what every single action movie would have us believe, it is rarely the best course of action. Brian was a little down on the film’s ponderous pace and lack of plot, but Hemal was taken in by all the tacit Amish steaminess.

 

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Hemal Jhaveri

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