In a sentenceThe convict gets the open road and the boy; the lawman gets whatever is left over and a woman who keeps correcting him
Robert ‘Butch’ Haynes (Kevin Costner) and Terry Pugh (Keith Szarabajka) break out of prison and break into a house, where they take a boy, Phillip Perry (T.J. Lowther), as a hostage. Phillip’s mother Gladys (Jennifer Griffin) has kept him from most of what other children take for granted. Terry wants the boy as something to hide behind. Butch finds himself wanting something else. Behind them comes Chief Red Garnett (Clint Eastwood), running the search from the road with Sally Gerber (Laura Dern), who keeps telling him things he does not want to hear, and Bobby Lee (Bradley Whitford), who has brought a rifle. In the stolen car, Butch starts asking the boy what he has never done, and begins working through the list.
Clint Eastwood’s slow, roomy chase film belongs to Kevin Costner and the boy beside him, and on the road it is close to fine. Every cut back to Eastwood himself, parked up with the police, lets the air out.
Clint Eastwood follows Unforgiven with a film that takes a convict, a lawman and a child, puts the two men at opposite ends of a chase across open country, and then declines to make a thriller of it. A Perfect World is a slow film in which the pursuer and the pursued barely share the screen, and it is good, sometimes better than good, whenever Kevin Costner is behind the wheel. Whenever it goes back to Eastwood, parked up with the police, it stalls.
The setup is quick. Butch Haynes (Costner) and Terry Pugh (Keith Szarabajka) come out of prison, break into a house and leave with a boy, Phillip Perry (T.J. Lowther), whose mother Gladys (Jennifer Griffin) has kept him from most of what other children are given. Terry wants the boy as something to hide behind. Butch does not know yet what he wants him for. Szarabajka plays Terry as a plain brute, and the film is rid of him early, which takes the only visible menace off the road and leaves Costner to supply it himself.
He supplies it quietly. Costner holds a gun as if he would rather be holding a coffee, talks to the boy as to a colleague, and lets a temper arrive with no warning at all, so that a scene in a shop or a farm kitchen can turn on a single sentence. Lowther barely seems to act: he watches Butch, reaches conclusions about him, and keeps them to himself. The small thefts Butch commits on the boy’s behalf, so he can have the things he was never allowed, are the film’s best idea, and Erica Edell Phillips dresses the pair in clothes that look picked up along the way, which is the point. We laughed when the boy, asked to list the things he has never done, comes up with such small ones, and we were caught off guard, later, by how much of the film turns out to be about that list.
Jack N. Green shoots the country flat and wide, in low yellow light, with the stolen car a small bright thing on roads that have nothing on either side of them. Henry Bumstead’s farmhouses and filling stations look lived in rather than dressed, and he gives the police almost nothing to look at, which suits them. Lennie Niehaus writes a soft, spare score and is seldom asked to play it; most of what we hear is the car radio, and that is the right call.
The trouble is everyone on Garnett’s side of the chase. Eastwood gives himself Chief Red Garnett, the man running the hunt, and plays him as a tired man with something on his mind he is not saying, which would be enough if the scenes around him had anything else to do. Laura Dern’s Sally Gerber is written as the person who is right and is told she is wrong, several times an hour, and Dern does what can be done with that. Bradley Whitford’s Bobby Lee is a sneer with a rifle. The editors, Joel Cox and Ron Spang, cut back to these people far more often than the story needs, and each time the film has to get itself moving again. It runs 138 minutes, and we felt about twenty of them with the police.
Unforgiven was about an old killer who could not stop. This is about a younger one who might have become something else, and Eastwood directs it with the same patience and less nerve. He is fonder of Butch than John Lee Hancock’s script has quite earned, and the film’s treatment of the boy’s mother and her strictness, as a joke and an obstacle, is the one cheap thing in it.
The last half hour takes the story somewhere we will not describe. We can say that it moved us more than we had expected, that it is Lowther’s face that does it and not the music, and that Green shoots it wide and nobody talks over it. It is a long way to travel for that half hour. If you like your chases slow and your outlaws polite, it is worth the drive. Sit through the police scenes, and keep your eye on the boy.
Most critics come down in favour of A Perfect World, though the warmth is qualified rather than full-throated. The praise gathers almost entirely around Kevin Costner, whose restrained, introspective playing of the fugitive is admired even by those who dislike the film around him, and around the bond between his character and the boy he takes hostage, which several reviews treat as the film’s real subject. The general verdict is of a sombre, affecting drama that is more thoughtful than its chase-story shape suggests.
The reservations are mostly about pace and structure. Variety finds the police scenes slow the story, and the Los Angeles Times goes further, calling the whole thing sluggish and muddled. Empire blames the script and thin character development. Time Out thinks it lacks the mix of genre and subversion found in Eastwood’s better films, and the Radio Times, otherwise approving, finds the central pairing short on chemistry. The spread is wide, from strong approval to outright disappointment, with the two dissenters agreeing only that Costner deserved a better film.
Ebert regards the film as a thoughtful, affecting drama. He praises the relationship between the escaped convict and the boy he takes hostage.
Read the full review →Ferguson calls the film very good, though its central pairing lacks chemistry. He notes Costner’s introspective performance and the curious bond between his character and the boy.
Read the full review →The review finds the film very entertaining, though it lacks the assured blend of genre traditions and subversion found in Eastwood’s best work. The page’s description singles out its entertainment value while noting that shortcoming.
Read the full review →McCarthy finds the film somber and subtly nuanced, with its central surrogate father-son relationship providing its strongest emotional pull. He particularly praises Kevin Costner’s restrained performance, while faulting the police scenes for slowing the story.
Read the full review →The page could not be accessed, so the critic’s verdict cannot be verified. The URL identifies a review, but provides no accessible detail about what it praises or criticizes.
Read the full review →The review praises the film as an emotionally resonant, richly layered work, while noting the Blu-ray release lacks extras. It singles out the transfer’s vivid rural Texas imagery and crisp detail for praise.
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BadlandsTwo runaways, flat country and a camera that keeps its distance; the film this one remembers.
Paper MoonA con man, a child and a car; the comic version of the same bargain.
Kikujiro · not reviewed yetTakeshi Kitano’s bad-tempered layabout takes a boy on a long walk and improves slightly.
Central StationA Brazilian letter-writer and an orphan cross the country; harder, sadder, equally unhurried.
The Sugarland Express · not reviewed yetSpielberg’s first Texas chase, with half the state’s police trailing one slow car.
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