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When Samuel (Lukas Haas), a young Amish boy traveling with his mother Rachel (Kelly McGillis), witnesses the murder of a police officer in a public restroom, he and his mother become the temporary wards of John Book (Harrison Ford), a detective who's been assigned to solve the crime. After suspect lineups and mug-shot books yield nothing, Samuel, in the most memorable scene of the film, recognizes the murderer as a narcotics agent whose picture he sees in the precinct. Once Book realizes that the police chief is in on it, too, he whisks Samuel and Rachel back home to Amish country, where he himself goes into hiding as a plain Amish man. The juxtaposition between the life of the Amish and the violence of inner-city police corruption work surprisingly well for the story, and Kelly McGillis as the falling in love widow gives an almost perfect performance. Directed by Peter Weir, the film is extremely successful in drawing the viewer into its world and, accordingly, is immensely entertaining. The only thing that mars its polish is the one-dimensional, almost cartoonish handling of the upper-echelon police corruption--a subtler, more realistic treatment of this aspect of the story would have rendered the film near perfect.
--James McGrath
DVD features
An interesting 75-minute documentary is the only new item on this DVD besides one deleted sequence (which appeared in TV editions). Broken into five parts for no reason, the deftly produced program does an excellent job of dissecting how the main players were involved, including director Peter Weir, cinematographer John Seale, and actors Harrison Ford, Kelly McGillis, Lukas Haas, and Viggo Mortensen (whose first film role was one of the Amish extras). You definitely get the feeling that many of the most memorable scenes were created extemporaneously onset by Weir and others, which may be the reason the Oscar-winning writers are not in this documentary, or thanked Weir when they accepted their award.
--Doug Thomas
