A Perfect World’s narrative is set into motion by the taking of a hostage: an 8-year-old boy most people call Buzz (T.J. Lowther) by recent prison escapees Butch and Terry (Kevin Costner and Keith Szarabajka). I couldn’t remember by the end of the film what the fugitives had had in mind when they were breaking into Buzz’s suburban home: I’d gotten too wrapped up in the relationship that emerges between the latter and Butch.
A Perfect World (1993) is something of a chase movie. It isn’t long before Butch and Buzz, blessedly free of the scary Terry before he can do too much damage, are all over the news, Butch framed with the expectedly lurid colors with which audacious criminals of his ilk are drawn on the explosive front pages of attention-hungry newspapers. (The movie is set in Texas in 1963.) On their trail in a chrome Airstream dragged along the roads by a red pickup are a sensitive criminologist (Laura Dern); a callous FBI sharpshooter (Bradley Whitford); and a police chief, Red (Clint Eastwood, who also directed the movie from a screenplay by John Lee Hancock), who has an old connection to Butch that’d been haunting him long before the movie starts. He was the arresting officer years ago when Butch, bred in a tumultuous household, impulsively stole a car he couldn’t resist taking for a spin. He decided to give the then-teenager a more severe sentence than necessary because he unwisely thought prison would give him more stability than his home life could.
Kids ought to be treated with more care than that, or else they might grow up lost and mad enough to do something like this, A Perfect World suggests. The chase Butch’s actions beget doesn’t create any excitement; neither Eastwood nor Hancock is interested in bastardizing what amounts to a tragedy into a thriller. They want their characters to look inward, and if not that, try to work out the things bothering them maybe unconsciously until now. Red thinks that if he can put a peaceful end to what’s going on, he can make up for what he’s obliquely responsible for “doing” to the man in pursuit. The Dern character has great sympathy for a man whose criminal profile she knows to a T; she also seems to want to use this case as a means for respect in a field where being young and female are ways to be forever underestimated.
Butch becomes a stand-in father figure for this single mother-raised boy he treats with a surprising amount of care, ready to inflict violence on anybody who in any way harms him or seems like they might. (It’s implied that he sees Buzz as an avatar for a younger version of himself; he’s wont to provide him the sense of safety and protection he didn’t himself get growing up, even though the reason for their crossing paths is antithetical to both things.) Buzz ends up seeming to enjoy the topsy-turvy life of a hostage, where his captor allows him to do things like sit atop their latest stolen car as it breezes down the highway or wear a picked-up Halloween costume — a childhood pleasure Buzz hasn’t been afforded on account of growing up in a household headed by a Jehovah’s Witness mother. Returning home for the kid doesn’t seem to represent freedom to him; he might feel even more repressed there than in this dangerous situation whose pit stops alternate between lighthearted adventurousness and anxiety-making.
Butch and Buzz’s relationship, tremendously performed by the impressively expressive Lowther and a rarely better Costner, is knottingly touching. A Perfect World doesn’t betray a need for tidy conclusions. People are good and bad; one can sympathize with those who’ve done terrible things. More resolute is its conviction that governmental insensitivity and bureaucratic duty can ruin lives before they’ve really gotten started. Even in this rash bid for freedom, Butch is basically stuck, shackled to a past from which he’ll never be unchained, running toward a destination he’ll never be able to find.
Peterson Reviews 