Unrestricted: the ratings game - motion picture ratings - Editorial

Christian Century, Dec 8, 1993 by James M. Wall

A standard chase film, A Perfect A World begins with a prison break by Butch Haynes (played by Costnet) and his traveling companion, a particularly unsavory character soon revealed to be a child molester. Looking for a car to steal, the two escapees break into a home, terrorize the mother in front of her children and abduct seven-year-old Phillip Perry (played by Lowther). The nice guy of the pair is played by Costner, and it is obvious that he will become something of a surrogate father to the boy. The core of the film is their developing relationship. Eastwood, who directs, has a relatively minor role as the Texas state patrol officer who chases Haynes.

As they race across country, Haynes gives Phillip lessons on how to get along in the real world outside the narrow confines of his mother's Jehovah's Witnesses faith, which is described as a kill-joy enterprise. Phillip complains that his mother's religious faith has kept him from such essential childhood activities as trick-or-treating on Halloween (a deprivation the audience has already seen depicted under the picture's opening credits, as the religious family turns away a group of smiling children who approach the house with hands out), or riding a roller coaster and eating cotton candy at the county fair. Butch promises Phillip they will go trick-or-treating, and supported by the implied threat of Butch's gun they persuade a frightened farm wife to give them food and money. Phillip approaches the house wearing a Caspar the Friendly Ghost face mask that he stole from a store, an act that Butch condones.

Phillip also receives some hasty sex education from Butch after the boy sees a sexual encounter between his older friend and a woman he picks np in a bar. The sex scene was apparently edited by Eastwood in his initial bid for the PG-13 rating, but the conversation that follows is intact, including Phillip's innocent query as to why Butch was kissing the lady's posterior (not the term used). "Do you love her?" asks the child. Butch is hard-pressed to give an answer. Parents who take children to this film should be ready to face similar questions.

The boy also doesn't know anything about guns, but that is remedied by Butch, who encourages Phillip's use of firearms, with fatal results. Finally, in a climactic scene, Butch agrees to return the boy to his mother if she will agree to release him from the code of the Jehovah's Witnesses. What is a mother to do? She agrees.

Eastwood's previous directorial effort was the dark, brooding, masterful Unforgiven, a film that justifiably received an Academy Award. But A Perfect World deserves the title "Unforgivable" or perhaps "The Corruption of a Seven-Year-Old." I cannot remember ever seeing a film that employs a child to deliberately debunk a particular set of religious beliefs. I asked Henry Herx, specialist on film on the staff of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, if he could recall a film in which adults openly debunked a specific Protestant group. No, he answered. "This is a new phenomenon."