A Perfect World

365 Films

Entry #31

A Perfect World (1993)

Directed by: Clint Eastwood

Clint Eastwood is an incredibly frustrating filmmaker.  For every masterpiece like A Pefect World, there is an absolute ham-fisted clunker like Hereafter.  The list goes on and on for me, yet, I will always hold out hope.  For the second half of the previous decade I had to plug my ears and grind my teeth while listening to the lavish overvaluing of films like Gran Torino and Million Dollar Baby.  Yet, sandwiched between those two was Letters From Iwo Jima, his stirring Japanese World War II film.  I think you get the idea.  I used to have a formula for Mr. Eastwood that if he continued on his film-a-year game plan that it would probably wind up as a 50-50 split of good to bad films.  Every other year would give me something to look forward to.  You can then imagine my astonishment when I read that A Perfect World followed Unforgiven just a year later in Mr. Eastwood’s directorial filmography.  Therein lies the systemic anomaly, if you will.  Editor’s Note: if you haven’t seen Unforgiven, you should probably go check that out right now.  A Perfect World tells the story of Butch Haynes (Kevin Costner), a recently escaped convict who kidnaps Phillip, the youngest child of a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses and begins an interstate manhunt across the Texas Panhandle.  Eastwood plays the Texas Ranger tasked to hunt him down who must team up with a brilliant criminologist (Laura Dern) to track Butch in the governor’s spiffy new airstream trailer which is supposed to be used the following week for President Kennedy’s visit to Dallas in November of 1963.  A Perfect World is a film of characters obsessed with the future and the past, so much so, that the present barely seems to register.  Butch tells Phillip at one point that his car is a time machine.  The windshield shows them the future as the horizon while the back window delineates the past speeding away from them.  In a way, that charming piece of child’s play not only represents the idea of an escaped convict seeking a new life in an attempt to make up for the failed one currently in his possession, but also that of a nation about to go through an exhausting trial by fire.  Eastwood’s character is particularly fascinating in this regard in that he is playing the usually crusty, tough as nails lawman, only this time he has to contend with a trailblazing progressive thinker who wants to plug the how and whys of the criminal mind into his gunslinger equation.  And she’s a woman, no less! This is the essence of a Perfect World’s brilliance.  It attempts to tell a small story with incredibly massive implications.  It brings together, as all great movies about children do, the story-telling qualities of myth and tragedy.  It does so with Eastwood’s trademark understated lyricism and acute attention to performance.  I really can’t say enough about the direction in this film, which is a thing of beauty to watch.  There is a sequence late in the film detailing Butch’s sadistic outburst at a family of poor Black farmers that is simply stunning to behold.  The way Eastwood yanks your emotional sympathies from one extreme to the other; all within the breadth of a single sequence is nothing short of flawless perfection.  The world may be careening recklessly towards an uncertain future, but with films like A Perfect World at our disposal, we might as well enjoy the ride.