A Perfect World (Film Review)

1993 Warner Bros.
Directed by: Clint Eastwood; Written by: John Lee Hancock
Starring: Kevin Costner, Clint Eastwood, and Laura Dern
MPAA Rating: PG-13; Running Time: 138 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 9/10

Butch Haynes and Terry Pugh break out of a rural Texas prison in 1963, head for a small town, and take an eight-year-old boy, Phillip, hostage. While Terry is an all-out sociopath, Butch is far more morally sophisticated, and when Terry seriously threatens Phillip's life, Butch eliminates Terry. Butch soon finds he and Phillip have much in common. Both their fathers abandoned them. As a Jehovah's Witness, Phillip is in danger of being deprived of an All-American youth just as much as the whorehouse-raised Butch was. Now, on a cross-Texas road trip, hunted down by the authorities, and mostly failing to tamp down his criminal tendencies to rob and antagonize every countrysider in sight, Butch decides to give Terry the childhood he never had.
1993s A Perfect World offers classic 90s cinematic moral complexity. Written by John Lee Hancock and directed by a peak Clint Eastwood, the film expertly blends a crime film, a road film, a father-son film, a philosophical study, and a vision of America in 138 minutes that absolutely fly by. As Butch, Kevin Costner gives a career best performance. He's a deeply wounded and flawed man trying to finally do something right, and Costner imbues the character with life and an inferred rich history so strongly, even if the film didn't give his backstory (which it does in remarkably inventive ways), the viewer could easily imagine it. Eastwood, directing at the same high level he achieved in the previous year's Unforgiven, pulls double-duty as the weary lawman on Butch's trail. This is the type of character Eastwood can and probably has played in his sleep, but here he brings a unique energy that belies the complex history his character is revealed to have with Butch. Newcomer, young T.J. Lowther, gives a phenomenal performance as Phillip, forgoing the general precociousness often found in these kinds of parts for a quiet, far more believable realism. Laura Dern rounds out the main cast as a criminal profiler who at first seems like a token government tagalong, but who soon proves herself to be a great asset and ally to Eastwood's law enforcer. Dern brings both charm and weight to a role that would be extraneous in a worse written, directed, and acted film.
The result is a paradoxically enjoyable and difficult film, where every positive moment is offset by the natural consequence of the lead character being a lifelong criminal. Eastwood lingers on beautiful natural imagery before it is sullied by a robbery or an assault. A Perfect World consistently chews on its deep themes of cause and effect, sins of the father, good and evil, and by its inexorable end, as the credits role, the viewer is left to sit with all of it. This magnificent early 90s ambivalence feels admirable and delightfully out of step with 2020s cinema. A Perfect World is a forgotten classic.