A Perfect World Blu-ray Review
Butch Haynes and the Jehovah's Witness Kid
Reviewed by Michael Reuben, June 5, 2012
It's hard to remember now, but for the first two decades of his directing career, Clint Eastwood
was rarely taken seriously as a filmmaker. The Man with No Name and Dirty Harry had made
him a screen icon, and Sergio Leone and Don Siegel—who'd directed the creation of those
characters and who Eastwood has often acknowledged—taught him how to construct images and
narrative. Beginning with
Play Misty for Me in 1971 (a film he did for free just to get the
chance to direct), Eastwood showcased himself in various familiar genres: westerns (
High Plains
Drifter,
The Outlaw Josey Wales,
Pale Rider), thrillers (
The Eiger
Sanction,
The Gauntlet, the Dirty Harry sequel
Sudden Impact) and military
stories (
Firefox,
Heartbreak Ridge). He even made a few films that didn't fit any mold
(
Bronco Billy,
Honkytonk Man), but throughout these efforts the appeal remained
consistent. When people bought tickets, it was to see Eastwood the star, not Eastwood the
director.
Then came
Bird, the 1988 biopic of jazzman Charlie Parker, starring future Oscar winner Forest
Whitaker in a soulful and tragic performance as the self-destructive sax player. The film was a
passion project for Eastwood, and he did not appear in it. Critics and audiences were equally
nonplussed. Did the man with no name and a magnum really expect to be taken
seriously behind
the camera? (In fact, yes.
Bird holds up well.) Reaction was no more favorable to the
director's next effort, 1990's
White Hunter Black Heart, in which Eastwood played a John
Huston-like director making a film much like
The African Queen. The film didn't work then and
still doesn't. Not only is it too much of an insider's tale, but Eastwood also made one of his rare
casting mistakes by giving himself the Huston role. (Wild eccentricity is not his strong suit.)
With the advantage of hindsight, it's easy to see now that both
Bird and
White Hunter Black
Heart marked the beginning of the restless experimentation that has characterized Eastwood's
work ever since. The only certainty about a new Eastwood film is that it will be unlike the last
one and probably unlike any before it (which is the most charitable way of explaining
Eastwood's other 1990 release, the stuntman extravaganza,
The Rookie). Not until 1992's
Unforgiven did public perception catch up with Eastwood's artistic progress, aided no doubt by
the film's deceptively familiar Western packaging. The following year, Eastwood officially
attained the exalted position he has occupied for the two decades since with the receipt of Oscars
for directing and producing
Unforgiven.
By then, however, the newly acknowledged auteur was deep into preparation for his next film,
A
Perfect World, in which Eastwood initially planned not to appear but eventually took a
supporting role at the urging of star Kevin Costner. One of the intriguing ironies of Eastwood's
career is that, even as he was being celebrated for the moral complexities of
Unforgiven, he
was already in the process of surpassing it with what appears, at first glance, to be a simple tale
about an escaped convict.
At its most basic, the story of
A Perfect World follows the escape of Butch Haynes (Costner)
from the state penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas, on the night of Halloween, 1962, and his pursuit
by Texas rangers led by Chief Red Garnett (Eastwood). In other hands, the spare script by John
Lee Hancock (the future writer-director of
The Blind Side) might have become a B-movie
thriller. Certainly Eastwood's film contains several tautly suspenseful sequences, usually where
someone is unaware of how dangerous a man they're dealing with. But these experiences of
danger are merely a means to more interesting ends.
Butch is an enigma: taciturn, mercurial, equally capable of violence and kindness without
hesitation (or explanation). To effectuate his escape, he needs the assistance of another inmate,
Terry Pugh (Keith Szarabajka), a more traditional hooligan whom Butch dislikes and doesn't
mind telling so. Terry and Butch part ways early in the film, but not before invading the home of
Gladys Perry (Jennifer Griffin) and her three children, looking for food (and in Terry's case,
something more, which Butch prevents). When an elderly neighbor notices the commotion and
comes calling with a shotgun, Butch and Terry flee in Gladys' car, taking her eight-year-old son,
Phillip (T.J. Lowther), as a hostage. Butch nicknames him "Buzz".
Once they've separated from Terry, Buzz's kidnapping becomes the greatest adventure of his young
life. Raised in a strict religious household (the Perrys are Jehovah's Witnesses), Buzz has never
been allowed to trick-or-treat, attend a carnival or eat cotton candy. His father is out of the
picture, which, as Butch points out, gives them something in common. Butch quickly becomes
the boy's surrogate older brother, answering questions he can't ask anyone else and exposing him
to the wonders of the world beyond his doorstep. He even lets him acquire a Casper the Friendly
Ghost costume, as to which the possibilities for symbolism are almost
too ripe.
However, Butch and Buzz are not alone as they head for the Texas panhandle. Red Garnett is in
pursuit, having commandeered the new airstream trailer intended for the governor's reelection
campaign. Accompanying him are Rangers Adler and Bradley (Leo Burmester and Ray
McKinnon), driver Dick Suttle (Paul Hewitt) and a laconic FBI sharpshooter named Bobby Lee
(Bradley Whitford), who, during the course of the trip, will reveal himself to have as little of a
moral center as Butch's fellow escapee, Terry. An additional member of Red's party is a
criminologist from Gainesville, Sally Gerber (Laura Dern), whom Red has just met and doesn't
much care for. Gerber is part of a new state program to add modern social science to law
enforcement. She may seem like a typical egghead when she calls their mission a "penal escape
situation", but by the end she turns out to know a lot more about both Butch and Red than she
first lets on. (Among other things, Butch has an exceptionally high IQ, which, in a perfect world,
would have been used for better purposes than crime.)
As Butch and Buzz encounter various people, try to stay one step ahead of their pursuers and
grow close in unexpected ways, the deceptively simple surface of
A Perfect World opens into a
deep pool of uncertainties about character, how it's made and how society judges one person
good and another bad. It emerges that, when Butch was a teenager, a judge chose to sentence him
to four years of imprisonment rather than give him probation and return him to a lousy father
who would have certainly introduced him to a life of crime. Was that the correct decision? Was it
the role of the legal system to make it? And what distinguishes Butch and Terry from Bobby Lee,
the man with a badge and a rifle, who seems to enjoy threatening women as much as Terry and is even more
eager to kill people? The result of society's interventions in Butch's life has been to
create a more hardened and efficient criminal, with no illusions about human goodness and no
hesitation in exploiting others. And yet Butch is still capable of tenderness and compassion, as
his relationship with Buzz confirms.
All these doubts and questions swirl around the wide-eyed Buzz, whose expressive face registers
the strange events transpiring before him with the curiosity of childhood, even when those events
are frightful. If there's a shred of hope in the film's bleak landscape, it's the innate sense of right
and wrong that tells Buzz, at a crucial moment, what he has to do, even though it's hard. When
Red Garnett says resignedly at the end of the film, "I don't know nothin'. Not one damn thing",
he should try talking to Buzz.
