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A Perfect World
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Here is a
reverie that, once upon a time, it was hard for a besotted film critic to
suppress.
Between the
return of Robert Altman to commercial filmmaking, the appearance of the best
films by masters like Martin Scorsese or Brian De Palma, and the long overdue
acclaim finally granted Clint Eastwood as a director, it seemed in the early
‘90s as if contemporary American cinema had at last revived its golden era –
the era that began with Arthur Penn's The
Miracle Worker in 1962 and abruptly vanished when George Lucas made Star Wars in 1977.
Eastwood’s A Perfect World is sheer bliss for
anyone who has ever loved American cinema. Echoes of great, melancholic movies
like Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and Terrence Malick's Badlands (1973) fill this resolutely dark tale of
escaped criminal Butch (Kevin Costner) who takes an impressionable young boy
(T. J. Lowther) across America as his hostage.
But
Eastwood reaches back further into cinema history than his flashy, mannerist
contemporaries: in its understated, rich classicism, the film harks back to
John Ford's The Searchers (1956).
In the
masterly Unforgiven (1992), Eastwood found a precise
form for his style and sensibility: stories of maximum moral ambiguity where
the guilt for socially transgressive acts never comes to rest in a single
character, and the motivations behind good and evil behaviour alike remain
profoundly undecidable. Butch is a remarkable anti-hero, at once charming,
pitiable and unnervingly psychotic. The long, nerve-racking sequence in which
Butch subjects a poor, black family to the entire gamut of his suppressed
emotions is perhaps the tour de force of Eastwood's directorial career.
Fine as it
is, the film shares a structural problem with The Piano (1993): the central scenes
with Costner (who has never been better used) and Lowther are brilliant, but
the secondary material needed to pace out the narrative is far less strong. In
this case, the sub-plot of Eastwood and Laura Dern heading a police team adds
to the film's range of moods and underlines its key themes, but becomes at
moments facile and schematic.
No one,
however, should miss A Perfect World;
it is a complex, lyrical, confronting achievement which ranks, with De Palma's Carlito's Way (1993), among the very best American films of its year.
MORE Eastwood: Million Dollar Baby, Absolute Power, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, The Bridges of Madison County, Space Cowboys, Blood Work, Pale Rider, Mystic River, The Mule © Adrian Martin July 1994 |
