Peter Weir’s Witness was in the very first (unranked) Arts & Faith Top 100 list, but it failed to appear in the 2005, 2006, 2010, or 2011 lists. That first list was filled with commercial Hollywood fare, decisions that perhaps said more about the group’s unfamiliarity with world cinema than its taste. The Matrix, Changing Lanes, American Beauty, The Prince of Egypt, and Fight Club all made that first list and have not made an Arts & Faith list since.
But after over a decade of (over?)correction, voters are starting to include a few more Hollywood, studio movies in the Top 100. Blade Runner, On the Waterfront, and Witness, all returned to the Top 100, admittedly boosted by the most recent list being limited to one film per director.
Witness contains a respectful (though hardly idealized) portrait of an Amish community and in the midst of a decade in which religious communities were often only depicted as cults or crazies, that respect went a long way to winning fans. More subtle, perhaps, was the film’s tweaking of the genre’s normal conventions propagating the myth of redemptive violence. The love story does at times play as a religious form of Orientalism — making the Other exotic and taboo rather than human. But the film ultimately escaped cliche with the help of the earnest persona of Harrison Ford and the largely underrated performance by Kelly McGillis.
While its plot is vastly different, Witness evokes comparisons to the most famous American love story of all time: The Scarlet Letter. Both narratives depict the ways in which our idealization of the virginal or unobtainable female blurs the lines between spiritual and psycho-sexual while placing conflicting and impossible demands on women to be both objects of desire and role models in disciplining the lusts of the flesh. Three years before the actress made The Accused, her portrayal of Rachel came with a refreshing but bracing strain of anger and indignation — a reminder of how often for the modern woman simply seeing and being seen are actions fraught with complex dangers. — Kenneth R. Morefield
- Directed by: Peter Weir
- Produced by: David Bombyk Edward S. Feldman Wendy Stites
- Written by: William Kelley Pamela Wallace Earl W. Wallace
- Music by: Maurice Jarre
- Cinematography by: John Seale
- Editing by: Thom Noble
- Release Date: 1985
- Running Time: 112
- Language: English
Arts & Faith Lists:
2004 Top 100 — Unranked List
2020 Top 100 — #77