Clint Eastwood, in his job as director, sets out a group of well-defined, well-differentiated, well-distanced characters who are each enclosed by their individual circumstances, influences, choices. Two escaped convicts, who don't much like each other, and are soon reduced to just one, take as hostage the seven-year-old son of a Jehovah's Witness. (It's Halloween night, and religious reasons have kept the boy at home and without costume or bag of treats.) Hot on their trail is a colorful Texas Ranger aptly called Red Garnett (Eastwood himself, settling for a supporting role, but not diminishing his candlepower), a sort of "hillbilly Sherlock Holmes," who, against his personal preference, is fettered with a female criminologist (Laura Dern, all business, no dalliance) and a steely FBI agent, and headquartered, also against his preference, in an Airstream trailer described as "an amazingly futuristic piece of law-enforcement equipment" -- so described by the nameless Governor of Texas, who could only be the late, uninsultable John Connally: the year is 1963, on the eve of Kennedy's visit to Dallas: an open sesame to a simpler America. The convict (Kevin Costner, kept well clear of softness and cuteness) proves to be a subtle child psychologist, but also an autocratic teacher, father figure, role model: an unhesitant imposer of his own views and values. And before long our fledgling Jehovah's Witness (the unactorish T.J. Lowther) is dressed up as Casper the Friendly Ghost and strapped onto the roof of a station wagon in simulation of the carnival ride he has never been allowed to go on. This is at bottom the old familiar song of the open road -- a very American tune: Huck and Jim, et al. -- with the new-frontier or possibly end-of-the-rainbow destination of Alaska. They never get there, needless to say, or anywhere close. The climax summons up tremendous moral strength, reasserting rightness over self-gratification -- very American, too; very early American; very Puritan -- as well as over psychological excuse-making. It's a hard choice, and the squeezed-to-the-last-drop emotionalism of the ending is honestly earned. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd
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