_A Perfect World_

     The pairing of Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner approximates a media
event. According to a _New York Times_ spread, their parallel careers as
"two of Hollywood's best-known rugged individualists" overdetermine the
tone of their onscreen encounter. It's bound to be testy: those tough guy
poses, those surly non-lips, those wooden performances. 

     And yet, the movie's rhythms are weird and interesting enough that
this much anticipated encounter doesn't even take place until the last
fifteen minutes. Following the general trajectory of this summer's hits,
_In the Line of Fire_ and _The Fugitive_, Texas Ranger Red Garnett
(Eastwood) hunts down extra-intelligent escaped convict Butch Haynes
(Costner). They move in separate storylines to inevitable convergence. Set
just months before Kennedy will visit Dallas, the film has an
end-of-an-era feel to it: the cars are fifties-sixtiesish, the drawls are
more or less Southern, the characters are white and worried. 

     This imminent collapse alludes to current concerns about the end of
uncomplicated white-guy heroism (and Eastwood the director has been
working this out this for some time: see, for example, _Play Misty for Me_
[1971], _Honky Tonk Man_ [1982], _Unforgiven_ [1992]). The
Gerital-guzzling Red is assisted, against his better judgment, by a woman
criminologist sent by the Governor (fretting, of course, about his
re-election). The set up is basic: she totes large, bulky files full of
information, her hair is inrceasingly mussed; Red treats her with squinty
disdain. 

     As Sally, Laura Dern is caught between Renee Russo's Secret Service
Agent (whom Eastwood also called a "secretary" in _In the Line of Fire_)
and Stallone's partner (Sandra Bullock) in _Demolition Man_ (she makes a
well-timed crack about "dick jokes," so the audience is made aware that
the film doesn't subscribe to their dopey sexism). Sally, like her
predecessors, knows her stuff but must repeatedly prove it to the
uniformed, mush-minded neanderthals who surround her. 

     Red is less socially retarded than the egotistical, sunglassed fed
who comes on to Sally so clumsily and predictably that he seems to be from
another, less quirky movie. Rather, Red is rightfully upset about becoming
outdated (apparently the role of choice for new dad Eastwood these days).
This anxiety narrative is replayed variously, and even develops a deadpan
humor in the super-tech (circa 1963) State Headquarters on Wheels, a
trailer, complete with red, white and blue bunting, equipped as a kind of
rolling command post. Along the highway, the team (while arguing amongst
themselves) accidentally passes escapee's car: this leads to a goofball
chase scene and the trailer's awkward, embarrassing wreck. 

     This rather low comedy is remarkably effective, coming as it does
amid a sequence of appealing scenes that don't quite fit together. At this
point the movie is actually offbeat, intriguing for its emotional risks
and the strangeness of its visual rhythms. Cooped up in the trailer, the
guys and Sally act out a series of period melodramas, gender and class
conflicts in which the socially progressive side is sympathetic, if
tenuous. 

     To make its point that a moralistic, repressed but sensitive white
man can still function in this modern world, the film works some familiar
ground, old-dog-learning-new-tricks-wise he goes along with Sally's acting
out the murderer's record). But really the team is inept enough that they
only come on their prey when he's ready for them (shades of Harrison
Ford). Sally, of course, must comes around to respect Red, even if he is
crotchety and her IQ is higher. (I was almost convinced myself: I've
rarely heard a line-reading so deft as his response to the lamentable
post-crash dinner selection: "Is that so? I do _like_ Tater-Tots.")

     On the other side of this wits-match (and as high-scoring as Sally)
is Butch, whose scorn for his malevolent jailbreak partner wins him
immediate viewer sympathy. More endearingly, his attachment to his young
kidnap victim (six-year-old Phillip [T.J. Lowther]) begins to look like
yet another, even more oddball movie. Costner's performance is for the
most part careful, quiet, even charming (and there's a gift-image when
Butch parks his stolen under a Bull Durham advertisement, reminding us
that Costner was in a thoroughly appealing movie once). His explosive
scenes don't hold up, though, a function of the screenplay (which asks him
to go psycho at the drop of an Oedipal hat: lots of missing dads in this
movie) on top of his well-known limitations. 

     Dressed in a Casper the Friendly Ghost Halloween costume, little
Phillip is angelic and slightly creepy at the same time. His mom is a
(repressive) Jehovah's Witness and his dad has abandoned them, so he takes
to Butch despite the murderer's out-and-out scariness (besides, Butch
saves him from the derelict partner, defined as such by his sexual assault
on the boy). 

     The break comes over race, and the scene where Butch snaps - which he
must, or the boy might never get his moral deliverance - is extremely
disturbing, especially in its overt references to lynching (an image not
unlike Eastwood's last straw in _Unforgiven_, the death of Morgan
Freeman). Butch's assault on a black man makes a certain, labored sense as
part of the movie's ongoing father-fixation. But its racist implications
demand a more carefully articulated context; as a mere plot device, it's
weak.