Witness

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

At last, I think we have a more legitimate claim to counting towards my K2K, what with the Oscar wins and noms, and the 4-star Roger Ebert review. And if I recall from reading that Syd Field book on screenplays many years back, he really lauded Witness for having a perfectly constructed screenplay.

Which is funny to me, because although I thought this was a good one, my main complaints are with the screenplay. Besides some possible plot holes/implausibilities (I'm actually pretty forgiving of this sort of stuff, unless its glaring) the big problem is that they set up this little Amish boy as a major character, then pretty much forget about him during the second half of the film. They try to establish some sort of surrogate father dynamic with him and Harrison Ford, but then it really drifts in to the background as Ford starts becoming, um, surrogate husband to the kid's mom. So when the kid and Ford have a little moment at the end, I think the emotion is lost.

I'll be honest, I know romances play much bigger at the movies, but I would have been way more interested to see the movie focus on Ford and the kid, as the kid grows more attached to him. I mean, I guess we wouldn't have seen Kelly McGillis's tits that way, but still.

Speaking of Harrison Ford, I love the guy, but I still have no idea if he's a good actor. To clarify: he's a great actor in the sense that he's a great movie star, you just love watching him. He's got "it," whatever "it" is, and that's a big deal. But I'm not sure if he's a good actor in the, you know, creating original, nuanced characters and really exploring their depth sort of way. He tends to play variations on the same character (not a bad thing, I mean isn't that what we love about Humphrey Bogart, or Cary Grant, or Bruce Willis, or Seth Rogan, etc etc and so on?). Even in a totally non-genre movie like Working Girl, he plays that same kind of gruff but lovable and ultimately good person that he is in Star Wars or Indiana Jones. I should go back and try to watch some of his earlier pictures, back before he was a movie star, and see what kind of work he did before he established the Harrison Ford persona.


One of the reasons I picked Witness for my K2K was director Peter Weir. He did some excellent movies like The Truman Show and Master and Commander, and also the excruciatingly awful yet somehow beloved Dead Poets Society. (Witness falls somewhere in between, at "okay.") What interests me is that he has that sorta Curtis Hanson thing goin on, where his movies don't seem to have much in common except for the fact that they are often good. It kind of flies in the face of the auteur theory, which says that a director has a unique style and vision and repeating ideas and motifs that he brings to every movie, making it recognizably his. So you know next time you watch a Kurosawa movie, there will probably be something about society doing harm to the individual, and also there might be samurai. Or when you watch an Argento movie, you know someone in a tranchcoat and black gloves will murder a bunch of italian girls, and then some dude will see a clue in the beginning that he obsesses over and doesn't figure out until the end, and it'll basically be a slasher version of Blowup. Or when you watch a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, expect it to be long and have a lot of daddy issues. Or when you see something by that other Paul Anderson, Mr. Paul W.S. Anderson, you can expect a ragtag group of stereotypes to fight monsters while a clock ticks down and they have to get out of there before a bomb goes off or they are locked in a laboratory or hidden temple forever. Also, you can fully expect it to suck.

Anyway, I think my point was that I might watch another Peter Weir movie in the future.