Peter Weir is far from being the most talented, but is surely the most successful, current Australian filmmaker. The combination is unsurprising: It tends to take history decades to evaluate talent or its lack accurately, and the public is rather slower than that. With Witness, Weir (Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously) has made his first American movie, and it is no better, no less phony, than his Australian films. It is visually arresting, it has spurts of melodramatic excitement, and it is about as artistic as “Waltzing Matilda” played by a twohundred-piece symphonic orchestra.
Witness begins with an Amish funeral near Lancaster, Pennsylvania: Blackclad Amish are walking through wheat as high as a donkey’s eye. Why they should make things bad for the crop and hard for themselves instead of choosing the road is perfectly obvious: The shot is colorfully black-and-gold, quaint, and picturesque, with strange black hats barely bobbing above the wheat. For a director of Weir’s stamp that is reason enough. Newly widowed young Rachel Lapp is off with Samuel, her eight-year-old, to visit relatives in Baltimore. Having missed a connection in Philadelphia, the two must bide their time in the railway waiting room. Here we get wordlessly cute touches, such as the quizzical glances exchanged between little Samuel and an old Hassid, first attracted, then estranged by their similar yet different garb. In the deserted men’s room, Samuel witnesses a brutal murder (all murders are brutal, but Weir’s more so) in which two cops who are part of a multimilliondollar dope ring do in a third. That small, unworldly Samuel should be able to trick such experienced searchers in to not discovering him firmly situates Witness in the flimsy realm of make-believe.
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