Eastwood: A Perfect World (1993)

Of all Clint Eastwood’s variations on the road trip film, A Perfect World is probably the most perfectly realised. Set in 1963, it’s about an escaped convict, Butch Haynes (Kevin Costner), who takes 11-year old Phillip Perry (T.J. Lowther) hostage, and travels with him across Texas, where he’s pursued by Texas Ranger Red Garnett (Eastwood) and criminologist Sally Gerber (Laura Dern). For the most part, the film alternates between Butch and Red’s trajectories, as they travel ever deeper into the Texas panhandle – a region, we’re frequently reminded, where roads outnumber people; a vast, sprawling delta of dead ends and unfinished highways. Perhaps that’s why the action disperses, slackens and relaxes as the film progresses – by the time the film ends, both Butch and Red have imperceptibly moved from traversing these highways and byways to inhabiting them, meaning there’s no apprehension in any conventional, procedural sense, just a steady, gradual absorption into the rhythms of the road. That creates quite a timeless, ethereal atmosphere, as Eastwood embroiders and embellishes his taste for ageless Americana more than any of his period excursions to date. In particular, as Butch’s posse gathers more and more accessories and hangers-on – part of what slackens its momentum – it often feels like a revival of the carnivalesque troupe of Bronco Billy, especially since Butch is forced to use one of the Mayor’s electoral vehicles in place of his police car, imbuing his pursuit with all the picaresque merriment of the campaign trail. And, as a road trip back in time, a journey to the nostalgic American heartland, it’s probably the closest Eastwood’s come to Spielberg – in a way, that’s what makes it so different from Honkytonk Man, the closest film in Eastwood’s oeuvre in narrative, pace and period detail. Where Honkytonk Man was earthy, heartfelt, autobiographical – Kyle Eastwood’s debut role – here’s there’s a more fantastic, fantasmatic quality – Phillip’s taken on Halloween Eve – as the road trip takes Butch and Red towards the fathers they never had, and the fathers they never managed to be. All in all, that makes for one of Eastwood’s most mystical, visionary films, a companion piece to White Hunter Black Heart in the way it allows him to meditate on his masculinity and his legacy, and a perfect transition from Unforgiven into the next epoch in his career.