Witness - Directed by Peter Weir - Plot Summary 3

Gap-fill exercise

Fill in all the gaps, then press "Check" to check your answers.
   adults      ambush      Amish      Australian      city      clichés      community      cultural gulf      dies      dignity      documentary feel      electricity      Ford      hooks      independent      Kelly McGillis      loss of blood      love story      matter      murder      Pennsylvania      Peter Weir      Philadelphia      romances      rural lifestyle      self-sufficient      shared      simplicity      suspicious      together      train journey      trust      ways of life      widow   
Witness comes billed as a thriller, but it's also an electrifying and poignant love story. Then it is a movie about the choices we make in life and the choices that other people make for us.

The film begins on an settlement in , where for 200 years a religious community has proudly held onto the ways of their ancestors. The Amish are deeply of outsiders and stubbornly dedicated to their , with its horses and carriages, its communal barn-raisings, its gas lanterns instead of , instead of buttons.

An Amish man . His widow and young son leave on a . In the train station in , the little boy witnesses a . Harrison plays the tough big city detective who gets assigned to the case. He stages lineups hoping the kid can spot the murderer. He shows the kid mug shots. Then it turns out that the police department itself is implicated in the killing. Ford is nearly murdered in an . His life and the lives of the widow and her son are in immediate danger. He manages to drive them all back to the Amish lands of Pennsylvania before collapsing from .

Up until the return to Pennsylvania, "Witness" has been a slick, superior thriller. Now it turns into an intelligent and perceptive . It's not one of those where the man and woman fall into each other's arms because their hormones are programmed that way. It's about two , complicated people who begin to love each other because they have danger, they work well , they respect each other - and because their physical attraction for each other is so strong it almost becomes another character in the movie.

"Witness" was directed by , the gifted director of "The Year of Living Dangerously." He has a strong and sure feeling for places, for the land, for the way that people build their self-regard by the way they do their work.

In the whole middle section of this movie, he shows the man from the and the simple Amish women within the context of the Amish . It is masterful filmmaking, The thriller elements alone would command our attention. The love story by itself would be exciting. The in the Amish community are so well observed that they have a . But all three elements work together so well that something organic is happening here; we're inside this story.

Harrison Ford has never given a better performance in a movie. , the young actress who plays the Amish , has a kind of luminous about her; it is refreshing and even subtly erotic to see a woman who doesn't subscribe to all the standard man-woman programmed responses of modern society.

The love that begins to grow between them is not made out of ; the that separates them, is at least as important to both of them as the feelings they have. When they finally kiss, it is a glorious sensuous moment because this kiss is a sharing of and passion, not just another plug-in element from your standard kit of movie images.

We have lately been getting so many pallid, bloodless little movies mostly recycled teenage exploitation films made by ambitious young stylist without a thought in their heads - that "Witness" arrives like a fresh new day. It is a movie about , whose lives have and whose choices to them. And it is also one hell of a thriller.