Good Bones

You know what’s a good movie? Witness is a good movie.

You probably already know that. I mean, I knew it too. But I’ve sort of taken it for granted, and as director Peter Weir went on to make more complex and ambitious movies it’s sort of receded into his filmography as the American breakthrough that let him go on to bigger and better things. But revisiting Witness in a new Arrow Video 4K special edition let me realize just how good it is.

Released in 1985, Weir’s film stars Harrison Ford as John Book, a homicide detective who catches a murder in a Philadelphia train station: An undercover cop has been killed, and the sole witness to the crime is eight-year-old Samuel Lapp (Lukas Haas). When the murder opens up a larger criminal conspiracy and Book is wounded in an attempt on Samuel’s life, he’s forced to hide out in Pennsylvania’s Amish country with Samuel and his widowed mother Rachel (Kelly McGillis). And then things get complicated.

Four decades on, Witness remains an anomaly: It’s a high-concept studio picture with an A-list star that has absolutely no interest in whether or not it connects with a mass audience. I don’t mean that as an insult; everyone involved clearly wanted the movie to be a hit. In one of the supplements on Arrow’s disc, Ford talks about hoping to be able to open a film without Steven Spielberg or George Lucas’ name attached.

But Weir never leans into the thriller aspects of the story, and indeed once Book gets Rachel and Samuel back home the movie’s pace slows to a crawl, letting us watch Book recover from his injuries and slowly become part of the Amish community, helping and learning and gradually bonding with his hosts – and, of course, falling for Rachel – before the mechanisms of the plot force a big confrontation. But even that doesn’t really go the way a slicker movie might have played it; it’s so odd to realize Witness followed Beverly Hills Cop into theatres by a couple of months, rather than the other way around. Weir’s approach, and Ford’s performance, feel downright old-fashioned.

Maybe that’s why the movie holds up so well. It’s daring in a quiet way, avoiding the slickness that was just starting to permeate studio moviemaking and letting emotion and atmosphere pull us into the world. Casting director Diane Crittenden outdid herself on this one, balancing unknown faces like McGillis and Viggo Mortensen with veterans like Josef Sommer and Jan Rubes and rising stars like LuPone and Glover and even convincing Weir to take a look at this recently defected Russian ballet dancer for the pivotal role of Rachel’s would-be suitor Daniel. Every single one of them is perfect, and it’s really nice, in the rear view, to realize Weir was positioning Ford as a confident but generous scene partner, making sure not to hang the film entirely on his star the way Paramount’s marketing campaign did.

Arrow’s release (available in separate UHD and Blu-ray editions) restores Witness to its theatrical glory: The 4K master is beautiful and almost entirely unblemished; other than some optical graininess around the titles, it could have been shot yesterday. Australian DP John Seale’s work never feels touristy or exoticized; he just frames the natural beauty of fields and wooden structures, lighting the interiors of the Amish homes in the style of Dutch painters. If anything, the Philadelphia sequence that opens the movie is more stylized, establishing the violent world in which Rachel and Samuel find themselves, and from which Book emerges.

The Dolby Stereo soundtrack has been gently remixed into 5.1 DTS-MA, expanding Maurice Jarré’s synth score and some atmospheric elements into the rear channels. (The original theatrical mix is also included as 2.0 PCM audio; a second 2.0 track offers a “home video mix” that didn’t sound markedly different to my ears.) It’s an excellent presentation of a movie that rather deliberately avoids any flash or flourishes.

Arrow’s supplemental section supports the feature with a fine mix of new and archival material. Australian film historian Jarret Gahan goes deep into the history of the film in a new audio commentary, its development at Paramount Pictures and its impact on the arcs of Weir and Ford’s careers, among other things. It’s more of an essay than a screen-specific track, filled with unexpected bits of detail like the laundry list of directors (Arthur Penn! Peter Yates! John Badham! Robert Redford?) producer Edward S. Feldman had to consider before Weir became available.

“The Eye of the Witness” is a new interview with DP Seale, who landed his first Oscar nomination for his exquisite work here; the visual essay “Show … Don’t Tell: The Quiet Power of Peter Weir’s Witness” lets critic Staci Layne Wilson celebrate the director’s confidence in his actors, and his willingness to trust them to deliver feeling without pages of expository dialogue. (The closing look between Book and Rachel was originally a full conversation that Weir threw out on the day, realizing Ford and McGillis could do the scene silently.)

Older extras include also on-set interviews with Weir, Ford and McGillis from the movie’s EPK, a deleted scene that gives us a little more time with Patti LuPone as Book’s sister and a 1999 interview with Weir from the first Witness DVD. And then there’s the Between Two Worlds, the excellent Sparkhill Productions documentary produced for Paramount’s special-edition DVD in 2005 but strangely absent from the studio’s subsequent Blu-ray. Just over an hour long, and steered largely by Weir and Feldman, it also features new interviews with Ford, McGillis, Haas, LuPone, Mortensen (who reveals he took his tiny role at the expense of the 1984 season of Shakespeare in the Park, a production of Henry V that ultimately starred Kevin Kline and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and cinematographer Seale.

It’s an excellent piece, with lots of room to discuss the themes of the film as well as the elaborate shoot, and Ford clearly relishing the chance to discuss his collaboration with Weir, with whom he’d go on to make The Mosquito Coast immediately afterward.

Speaking of interviews with Ford: The most valuable supplement in the set – at least from my perspective – is “Harrison Ford in Conversation”, a seven-minute interview the actor taped with Fort Worth journalist Bobbie Wygant on the Witness press junket. Opening with Wygant pointing out that Ford has seemed uncomfortable in past interviews, it’s absolutely excruciating in the chirpy banality of her questions – and also riveting in the way Ford’s smile grows more and more tortured as his interlocutor almost immediately pivots from talking about a project he clearly cares about to whether he enjoys being famous and if he’ll ever make another Star War.

Now, Ford is famous for his lack of interest in promotional appearances. I met him on the Clear and Present Danger junket, and he was cranky and combative, adversarial to everyone there in a manner I found downright unprofessional. But if the Wygant interview is representative of the level of vapid horseshit he’d been dealing with for the past decade or so, I have a lot of sympathy for Ford. Whatever his faults, he’s an immensely gifted actor who was far more interested in the art than the business. And Witness deserved one’s full attention. It still does.

ALSO OUT THIS WEEK

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One took up a lot of space in the home-video conversation this week, but it wasn’t the only new title vying for your attention.

Check out Blue Beetle, a stand-alone DC Comics adaptation starring Xolo Maridueña as Jaime Reyes, the latest iteration of the perpetually second-tier superhero. Here, he’s a Gotham College graduate returning home to the Miami-like metropolis Palmera City, and almost immediately yanked into a conspiracy that finds him bonded to an ancient alien symbiote.

This does not sit well with sinister CEO Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon), who’s trying to use the extraterrestrial scarab as the root of her cyber-soldier program, codenamed OMAC for One Man Army Corps. And to be honest it doesn’t sit all that well with Jaime, either; he just wanted to be a lawyer, and now he’s flying around shooting laser blasts at helicopters.

Charm City Kings director Ángel Manuel Soto spins the story with a bright, busy chaos, juggling nearly a dozen principal characters in what boils down to a tale of two families – Jaime’s close-knit clan, composed of Babel’s Adriana Barraza as his grandmother, Damián Alcázar and Predator’s Elpidia Carrillo as his parents, Belissa Escobedo as his younger sister Milagro and George Lopez as his conspiracy-nut uncle – and the splintered Kords, represented by Sarandon’s scheming Victoria, Bruna Marquezine as her good-hearted niece Jenny, Raoul Max Trujillo as Victoria’s cyborg henchman Carapax and Harvey Guillén as a Kord scientist who’s starting to develop a conscience about the whole working-for-a-corporation-that-has-cyborg-henchmen thing.

Nerd alert: Jenny Kord is the daughter of Victoria’s late brother Ted, whom comics readers will know as an earlier Blue Beetle, and a key member of Keith Giffen’s goofball Justice League series in the ’80s. Comics readers will also recognize the whole OMAC thing, and be impressed by screenwriter Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer going for such a deep cut … but I suspect the suits weren’t paying that much attention to this project, which began as one of the mid-range DC movies Warner commissioned for the HBO Max streaming service. (Unlike Batgirl, it not only survived the process but made it into theaters.)

The lack of oversight seems to have been freeing for Dunnet-Alcocer and Soto, who follow the Shazam! and Aquaman dictum of “no one expects that much from this character, go play” and lean into the frantic comedy of a reluctant superhero trying to master his powers while also arguing with the alien intelligence that came with them. (There’s a lot of screaming in Blue Beetle.)

The stakes are also considerably lower in this one, rooted in Jaime’s journey to self-actualization rather than the battle between realms and kingdoms that drove Fury of the Gods or the first Aquaman movie. That lets Blue Beetle be a lot lighter on its feet, most of its conflict coming from the mismatch of the Reyeses and the near-untouchable Victoria Kord. It only steps wrong once, really, with a climactic flashback to Reagan-era U.S. military activity in certain Latin American nations – a political aside that feels thuddingly out of place in this comic-book reality, especially when its only other attempt to reference real-world events has been played for laughs.

Maridueña, who broke out in Cobra Kai, is a very charming lead, even when CG-ed into a full-body super-suit that makes him look like a midnight-blue version of Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool. It’s baked into the character design, but it still feels awkward; fortunately, the movie does its best to blow past it. Warner’s recent creative shuffle of the DC movie machinery, combined with the film’s underwhelming box office, means we’re unlikely to see this version of the Blue Beetle on screen again … but if James Gunn is looking to staff up a new Justice League, Jaime would certainly be an asset.

Fun fact: Blue Beetle bit player Harvey Guillén turns up in another of this week’s new discs – or at least his voice does. Harvey makes a cameo in Strays, playing one of the dozen or so pups who shows up in the course of this riff on Disney's Incredible Journey and Homeward Bound - which, unlike its predecessors, is very much not for family viewing.

Produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller as part of their weird new brand of extreme-everything comedies (see also: Cocaine Bear, which weirdly enough I wrote about in the same newsletter as Shazam: Fury of the Gods), Strays is someone’s idea of an edgy riff on heartwarming talking-animal movies, where scrappy creatures conquer adversity to make lifelong bonds and learn valuable life lessons. This one does that, mostly, but also has wall-to-wall dick and poop jokes, with abandoned border terrier Reggie (Will Ferrell) learning the rules of life on the road from streetwise Boston terrier Bug (Jamie Foxx), and eventually enlisting headstrong Australian shepherd Maggie (Isla Fisher) and anxious, cone-wearing Great Dane Hunter (Randall Park) to help him get back home to his abusive owner Doug (Will Forte) … so Reggie can bite off Doug’s penis.

It's a novel premise for a talking-animal movie, I will say that much, and American Vandal screenwriter Doug Perrault takes his best shot at building some real feelings into the storyline, which lets Reggie come to terms with what amounts to lifelong emotional abuse over the course of the picture. But he also gets to roll in poop, hump whatever he wants and pee on stuff, so … I guess it all works out?

Honestly, I found a lot of the animal-abuse stuff uncomfortable – not that I believed any of it was real, but the sight of Forte in full-dirtbag mode shoving a dog off the couch and later swinging a baseball bat at Reggie and his pals is weirdly intense in a way that simply did not play for me. I have no doubt that the film’s canine cast was protected as well as, and probably better than, their human co-stars, but … my suspension of disbelief short-circuited early on, and that kept me from plugging into Strays.

That also had me constantly wondering who the film is for; the jokes fire off in all directions, from an ingenious jab at every movie where a dog solemnly narrates its master’s life to an extended mushroom-freakout sequence with a very dark (but very logical) punchline, but the film keeps resetting to a cheerfully optimistic tone, with Ferrell basically reviving his Buddy persona from Elf and director Josh Greenbaum bringing very little of the creative energy he displayed in the brilliant Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar. The dogs are great, though.

Extras on Universal’s Strays Blu-ray are of the can-you-believe-we-got-away-with-this variety, with six short featurettes – one of which focuses on Ferrell, Foxx, Fisher and Park’s communal recording sessions, which went a long way to establishing the unstructured nature of their characters’ conversations, another showcasing Forte’s willingness to be the villain the movie needs and a genuinely sweet look at the animal actors – and a commentary from Greenbaum and Perrault.

Warner’s Blue Beetle supplements are both more and less expansive: There’s no commentary, but a four-part documentary spends nearly an hour exploring the project’s genesis and production, two “Scarab Vision” scene breakdowns offer closer looks at key effects sequences, and  “Nana Knows Best”, a tongue-in-cheek celebration of Barraza’s indefatigable grandmother. She’s the one in the family with the Oscar nomination, after all.

Witness is is available in separate 4K and Blu-ray editions from Arrow Video; Blue Beetle is available in separate 4K and Blu-ray editions from Warner Home Entertainment, and Strays is available in a Blu-ray/DVD combo from Universal Studios Home Entertainment.

Coming next week: Kelly Reichardt’s latest is her first 4K release, and a Coens classic returns in UHD as well. Also: More Imprint titles!