MOVIE REVIEWS: UNHOLY INNOCENTS ABROAD IN THE WORLD : ‘Witness’: A Fleshless Plot, but Gorgeous to Watch

As Australian director Peter Weir opens “Witness” (citywide), we are meant to be startled, and we are. Wind-rustled grasses cover the bottom half of the screen, Maurice Jarre’s music has a tingling feeling of movement. Then up through the grasses, like living figures from a monument, a group of Amish men and women appear, on the way to the funeral of one of their community.

Everything suggests an earlier century. The shock is the dateline on the screen: Pennsylvania, 1984. The next is the sight of a black Amish buggy on the highway, nudged by a huge, impatient trailer rig.

So Weir sets up his newest juxtaposition of the worldly and the innocent. In his earlier works, “The Last Wave” and “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” the mystical aborigines were the innocents: The films were permeated with their magic, with illusion and mists of suggestion. “Witness” is just the opposite. Although it, too, is gorgeous to look at, this skeletal thriller is as direct and spare as its Mennonites.

Screenwriters Earl W. Wallace and William Kelley (from a story by Wallace, Kelley and Pamela Wallace) may have even pared a little too deeply as they set up their confrontation between violent and nonviolent ways of life, between Harrison Ford, a street-hardened Philadelphia detective, and Kelly McGillis, a freshly widowed young Amish mother whose beguiling little 8-year-old boy, Lukas Haas, has been the sole witness to a sordid, drug-related murder.

It is McGillis’ husband who is being laid to rest at the beginning of the film, and it’s the last thought anyone ever gives him. Since the rest of the action seems to follow closely on the heels of this tear-wracked funeral, you might assume that his loss might cast a shadow in his widow’s mind, or that his young son would mourn him, the way little children do. But he disappears as though erased; all we will ever know about the man is that he has shorter legs than Harrison Ford, who has occasion to wear his suit. Not much of a legacy.

Perhaps it’s not Amish custom to mourn--but the film doesn’t tell us that. Perhaps he was not a loving, but an unpleasant, husband--but we’re not told that either. This husband is only a prop to get the action going. But when you take such a human quality as mourning for the death of one’s closest family member out of the equation of your film, you remove a lot more than credibility. Empathy and humanity vanish as well, and what is left is beautiful looking and beautifully played, but essentially hollow.

All the flesh has been burned off these plot bones: Right away we know the villains and, if we’ve seen even one thriller before, the characters who will be gone before the last roll call. What’s left is the fun in watching a wide-eyed newcomer learn the ways of an alien world. From “Candide” to “ET” to “Starman,” it’s been a sure-fire gambit. With Ford as the unholy innocent, it’s electrifying.

Ford plays this detective as a man whose experience has given him heightened reactions to the world around him: His thumbs must be in a constant state of pricking. As young Haas (who was in “Testament” and looks still like the littlest mouse in the storybooks) wanders round-eyed around the noisy precinct office, it is this heightened sense that calls Ford’s attention to him at a crucial instant.

These reflexes almost form an aura around Ford; dancing with McGillis in one of the film’s loveliest scenes, he seems to hold her in step inside a field of electricity. (Useless, by now, to notice that this “plain” woman has picked up dancing somewhat faster than Rita Hayworth. And almost as useless to ponder Amish miracle cures for a bullet through the gut.) Ford’s gifts, a blend of humor, intimacy and chemical attraction, make you want to believe in what common sense says is horse manure.

Gillis, rounder and more earthbound than she was as the irresistible Geneva Spofford in “Reuben, Reuben,” is authoritative and quietly sensual as Rachel. Her way with Lukas Haas even makes you believe her as someone who has mothered a young child--not as easy as it may sound.

Director Weir clearly admires his new “outsiders,” who appear as earthy and direct and spare as Shakers. He stages a community barn raising (which is also a contest between city boy Ford and country boy Alexander Godunov for the attention of McGillis) as a soaring paean to communality. And the sensitive camera work of John Seale underlines the simplicity and warmth of these lives. (Seale, long associated with Weir, also photographed “Careful, He Might Hear You.”)

The cast, which also includes Josef Sommer as Ford’s superior officer, Danny Glover as Sommer’s cohort and Jan Rubes as McGillis’ father-in-law, is uniformly fine. What they all deserve is a script completely worthy of their artistry.

‘WITNESS’ A Paramount Pictures release. Producer Edward S. Feldman. Co-producer David Bombyk. Director Peter Weir. Screenplay Earl W. Wallace, William Kelley. Story Kelley, Wallace and Pamela Wallace. Camera John Seale. Production design Stan Jolley. Editor Thom Noble. Music Maurice Jarre. Associate producer Wendy Weir. Set decorator John Anderson. Set designer Craig Edgar. Costumes Shari Feldman, Dallas D. Dornan. With Harrison Ford, Kelly McGillis, Josef Sommer, Lukas Haas, Jan Rubes, Alexander Godunov, Danny Glover, Brent Jennings, Patti LuPone.

Running time: 1 hour, 52 minutes.

MPAA-rated: R (persons under 17 must be accompanied by parent or adult guardian).