Canter Bridge

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Harrison Ford shines in this lingering over the close-quarter differences between Pennsylvania’s Amish people and the ‘English’ life that by contrast seems so rude in this 1985 screen gem. Yet twenty-two years later, it is the young Kelly McGillis who nearly melts the screen with this early performance as Rachel, the Amish widow who takes in Harrison’s ‘John Book’ and grows into love with a fugitive from ‘the city’ whose own heart grows entwined with the Amish way.

Although the Amish did not like this film (it is a film), it remains as a deeply moving tribute to their chosen, peaceful way. Perhaps it is the finest thing we ‘English’—this reviewer grew up in Pennsylvania with the Amish as his neighbors—can offer them.

Not that they were asking for recognition.

Director Peter Weir caught them doing what they do best, going about the business of keeping peace and making the earth grow its greenest things. The occasional caricature that creeps in clumsily elevates the men and women it seeks to honor rather than reducing them to its dimensional poverty.

The Amish are not heroes and do not play that role particularly well on the wide screen (the actors of are course not Amish men and women). They are rather people who have from within community made a stark choice and chosen to celebrate both its limitations and the world it opens up to them.

Weir, Ford, McGinnis et al. did well to freeze-frame that choice as one that saved the life of a self-sufficient Baltimore policemen who stumbled upon corruption that made him a marked man in the city. It is a most moving still.

The film was uncanny in its capacity, in the end, to mark the Amish off in the most authentic way: not by sneering at their simplicity of style and rejection of ‘fashion’. Rather, as recent history has provided grim occasion for us to observe, the Amish are distinguished by the grace that they do not kill. And, when bloodied, they say the damndest thing: ‘We forgive’.

Witness indeed. And a superb movie.