Define "Perfect," Please

So Mike, Aaron and I watched A Perfect World last night, which was especially interesting in light of all the Million Dollar Baby hullaballoo going on; if you don't know about the protests for the latter - and you've seen the movie - I would recommend reading Roger Ebert's great analysis of the controversial aspects of the film here.

As the biggest fan of Million Dollar among the four of us, I was probably the most excited to see Perfect World. I know that Eastwood's directorial career throughout the 90's was a little spotty, but even when he is saddled with a lackluster script or a ridiculous concept, he usually finds ways to add weight and meaning to the story in interesting ways. Some critics - Stephanie Zacharek of Salon is one that springs immediately to mind - have complained that Million Dollar's cinematography was over-reliant on black spaces with big, bright bulbs that Clint et al. could stand under and look tortured. Personally, I felt the black-and-white contrast of the film's lighting emphasized the rigidity of the film's characters, and beyond that, I just like the way that kind of stark lighting plays over actors' faces; it lets them look a little bit like a living Rorschach blot. Reminds me of Caravaggio, to some degree.

But back to A Perfect World. This was Eastwood's follow-up to Unforgiven, my favorite film of his, and from what I can gather, it got a mostly positive reception upon its arrival. Overall, it's a fairly solid film, but man, does it pull some cornball moves every once in a while. Eastwood plays a Texas Ranger on the trail of Kevin Costner, an escaped convict holding a boy hostage, and the first half of the film sets up Eastwood's relationship with Laura Dern, a criminal psychologist. It's the most cliched old school-versus-new-school stuff you can think of for a while, with Bradley Whitford hanging around not doing much of anything other than setting up the movie's treacly ending. Costner starts out the movie with a partner that's equally cartoonish, and unsurprisingly the movie gets a lot better once he's out of the picture.

As usual, Eastwood does a great job of allowing the characters to express themselves at their own pace and not intruding on the narrative with camera tricks or whiz-bang sequences, but the script is so cardboard that there's only so much he can do. Gilding a turd and all that, I guess. A disappointing follow-up to Unforgiven, which shouldn't surprise me too much considering David Webb Peoples wrote that one and the immortal John Lee Hancock of The Alamo fame wrote Perfect World. Ah well. We'll always have Mystic River.