A Perfect World

The title refers to a place where the tale wouldn't happen, instead there's rural Texas right before the Kennedy assassination. Breakout on Halloween night, the fugitive (Kevin Costner) is an overgrown juvenile delinquent, laidback but for a sporadic psychotic gleam, "a fucking crazy man" is how his foul partner (Keith Szarabajka) describes him. The 8-year-old he kidnaps (T.J. Lowther) is a pensive suburban lad, lack of paternal figures links the two and gradually the crime spree feels like a joyride. (Childhood pleasures verboten at the devout household are happily recreated, trick-or-treating at gunpoint gets mustard sandwiches and the top of the car makes for an improvised roller-coaster.) "Some sort of hillbilly Sherlock Holmes" leads the manhunt, the Ranger (Clint Eastwood) with criminologist (Laura Dern) and FBI sharpshooter (Bradley Whitford) aboard the governor's mobile home, "an amazingly futuristic piece of law enforcement equipment." Unfinished roads and histories of violence: "Seek foolish destiny. That sort of thing." More than Pale Rider this is Eastwood's Shane, also his The Night of the Hunter and Badlands, assuredly his masterpiece. Small towns and their smiling clerks, where a Casper the Friendly Ghost mask is pilfered for a fraught symbol worn lightly. Alaska on a postcard is the "last of the wild frontier" to the desperado, in his eyes being "a fine family man" is the ultimate goal, his distant guardian is the lawman who chases tater tots with Geritol. An unmoored wagon at the roadblock and an interrupted schtup at the Squat & Gobble diner, an easeful, sustained grace throughout. The masculine critique-elegy builds beautifully to an invocation of In Cold Blood in the home of a heavy-handed sharecropper, and a vision of a bullet curtailing the pastoral innocence of boy and nation. "You're old enough to think for yourself." Cinematography by Jack N. Green. With Jennifer Griffin, Bruce McGill, Leo Burmester, Paul Hewitt, Ray McKinnon, Linda Hart, Mary Alice, and Wayne Dehart.