Thus, I took a reprieve and saw a film that was released in the early nineties. It seems like a different era, and in reality, I was making a new beginning at the times, having just begun graduate school. I remember when the film was released, but I don't seem to recall how it was received by critics back then. All I knew was that it was a Kevin Costner film, and that his star, so to speak, was already in decline.
I wanted to see this film because it was directed by Clint Eastwood, and I have undertaken a project to watch all his films. I appreciate their meditative nature, and have come to appreciate the maturity of his films and the way he has metamorphized as an artist. And I wasn't disappointed.
In this film we have a story that configures itself as a tragedy. We have a character with good qualities, evident in his strong nurturing instinct, but who also has faults. Perhaps his fault is rooted precisely in his positive attributes, and he becomes too protective. As I recall, Aristotle had specifically made this connection in his "Poetics", and it leads to a special form of poignancy because it reflects on how we all carry our own "hamarcia", our own seeds of destruction. It leads to his downfall, despite his attempts to escape his fate.
This is a road movie, and the road has always been a symbol for life. Movement seems to project a sense of progress, and this character is obsessed with finding a better place. He elaborates on this symbolism, calling his car a "time machine", always pointed forward to the future while the past receeds in the rear-view mirror. It is a seductive vision, and his future would seem to be pointing to Alaska, a vast, idealized landscape that is perfect for a romantic hero, one who looks for sweeping, solitary landscapes. The problem is that he is headed in the meantime for his home in a small town in western Texas, and our instincts always lead us in contradictory directions. And the fugitive is taking with him a hostage, a small eight year old boy who was forced on him by the mayhem caused by his escape partner, a psychopath who mercilessly drops out of the movie at an early stage.
The year is 1963, and the atmosphere seems resonant with the promise of idealism that wasn't redeemed. Kennedy is president, and by now we have all been powerfully seduced by the aura of Camelot and the vision of a young and idealistic president who promised a new form of leadership. Here was a president who proclaimed a new connection with the world, who understand the movement of decolonization that was sweeping across the world and giving birth to new nations in Africa and Asia, and who understood the need to offer a new and uplifiting vision of America to counter the influence of the Soviet Union. The mythology has obscured his mistakes, and we no longer remember him for the "Bay of Pigs" invasion or for his escalation of America's involvement in Vietnam.
The chase is bound to end tragically. He is being pursued by the Texan authorities and, in particular, by a crusty and implacable sheriff played by Eastwood himself. It is wonderful to see how the fugitive and his hostage bond together as they reflect on their own respective needs. The boy needs a father, someone to help him escape his own stifling circumstances, his own "prison" in which he is burdened by all manner of restrictions. His mother is a good woman but will not tell him the truth about his father who, in all probability, has abandoned them, and instead she holds devoutly to many restrictions that inhere to being a devout Jehovah's Witness. The particular religious affiliation does not really matter. The appeal of these road movies is that they encapsulate a desire to escape from all manner of stifling circumstances. It just so happens that so many of these escapes occur in the southern states.
In the end, the bond between the two characters, the fugitive and the hostage, is broken by a moment of violence that is extremely disturbing and constitutes an abrupt change of tone. At one moment we have the portrait of a man on the run, treating his hostage as a son and nurturing him while they both try to evade the pursuing officers. And then, abruptly, there is a change, and something sets him off. He has been identified, and the private demons that seem to drive him come suddenly to the fore. He proceeds to attack the family that has been unknowingly hosting them, tying them down and threatening them with escalating violence. It is abrupt, and it changes almost completely our perception of him.
He would seem to be purging all the anger he has felt about the absence of a father, an absence that, fittingly enough, was engineered by the pursuing sheriff (played by Eastwood, as mentioned before), who is still torn by guilt about this but who justified his act as a way to save the young boy, extracting him from his sordid and unpromising family circumstances which would seem to doom him to succumb to the violence and anti-social impulses of his family. It is all the more ironic that the Kevin Costner character has grown up and still succumbed, despite this intervention. It would almost seem to be fated, as in a Greek tragedy, and the more that is done to evade this fate, the more it is perversely engineered. In this episode, consequently, it is the young boy, crying in desperation as he witnesses the acts of this character whom he has come to trust, who rescues the family under attack by grabbing a gun and shooting the Kevin Costner character in the abdomen.
Perhaps curses, as in the old Greek vision, do persist to haunt entire families and communities.
There is a very emotional parting moment at the end, and then we are left to reflect on the dream that bound these two people for a short moment. "Enjoy it while you can", was the advice that the fugitive had given to the boy at the beginning of their journey, in a prophetic statement. It was a reverie, a temporary escape, and the two found comfort in each other's company before it all unraveled. There were private demons that couldn't be excorcised, and in the end they couldn't escape the strictures of society, one that needs to reassert its own conception of justice.
The movie ends as it begins, with a poetic scene in which the fugitive is lying on a grassy field, looking up at a pristine blue sky, feeling the breeze and enjoying the sunlight, in the process of dying after having received two gunshot wounds but enjoying for a brief but, strangely enough, eternal moment, the dream of a perfect world.
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