Rating summary

Movie		5.0
Video		4.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		4.5

A Perfect World Blu-ray Movie 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.

A Perfect World Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

A Perfect World was shot by Jack N. Green, who had been Eastwood's cinematographer since Heartbreak Ridge and would continue with him through Space Cowboys. Having graced Unforgiven with a rich, romantic glow that contrasted starkly with the ugly deeds of its characters, Green here created a flat, dusty look that captured the sparsely populated landscape of West Texas. Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is another in its series of solid catalogue releases featuring decent blacks, balanced colors, detailed imagery and appropriate contrast levels. Fine, natural film grain is evident throughout the image, and there are no signs of inappropriate digital tampering by way of high frequency filtering, artificial sharpening or other such manipulation. Compression artifacts were not an issue.

A Perfect World Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The credits indicate that A Perfect World was released in Dolby Surround. Discrete 5.1 formats were in the early phase of theatrical adoption in 1993, and sound designers were just beginning to explore their potential. Still, the DTS-HD MA 5.1 track on Warner's Blu-ray makes interesting use of the surround field at various points, most noticeably for the sounds of nature, such as bird calls and insect noises, when characters are out in the country and peacefully on their own to reflect and talk to each other. A few brief sequences of vehicular mayhem have enough impact to register but are tame by action movie standards. Dialogue is the most critical element of the soundtrack, and that is always clear. The gently pastoral and occasionally elegiac score by Lennie Niehaus, who was Eastwood's composer of choice before he began writing his own film music, is well represented.

A Perfect World Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Theatrical Trailer (SD; 2.35:1, enhanced; 1:57): Characterizing Butch as the "most dangerous man in America" is something of an overstatement, but the clips of Costner's performance capture some of the character's distinctive combination of menace and charisma.

A Perfect World Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

References to President Kennedy and an upcoming trip to Dallas prompted some viewers to conclude that A Perfect World is set in 1963, but as others have noted, Texas gubernatorial elections are held in even-numbered years. Still, the Governor (Dennis Letts) appears in one scene addressing the press, and he bears an unmistakable resemblance to John Connally, the Texas governor who was seriously wounded in Dallas by the gunfire that claimed President Kennedy's life. Regardless of the year, Eastwood makes a point of letting us know that A Perfect World is set before the watershed moment that shook America's self-confidence to the core and from which it has arguably never recovered. "I was different. The whole damn country was different!" says Frank Horrigan, the guilt-ridden Secret Service agent that Eastwood portrayed in In the Line of Fire immediately before filming A Perfect World. One of the subtle ironies of this quiet masterwork is to reveal layer upon layer of moral ambiguity in a world that, for many of its inhabitants, felt orderly and certain but would shortly be rocked in ways that even the haunted eyes of Chief Red Garnett could barely imagine. Highly recommended.