Haynes! Come Back, Haynes!

By RICHARD CORLISS

. It's Texas in the fall of 1963. Passionate rebel Kevin Costner is willing to break the rules to make a moral point. Flinty lawman Clint Eastwood is riding in a vehicle needed for President Kennedy's visit to Dallas. At first this looks like the convergence of two recent strains of Hollywood retro-history: JFK in the Line of Fire. But A Perfect World, which Eastwood directed from John Lee Hancock's script, is not another dark fable about Camelot. The stage is smaller here, the concerns personal rather than political. This is an old- fashioned, nicely spun-out, two-handed character drama. It just takes the film a while to reveal who its main players are and how ambitious its agenda is.

Butch Haynes (Costner), a "criminal's criminal," has broken out of jail along with Terry (Keith Szarabajka), a garden-variety psychopath. The convicts terrorize a mother and her children and take seven-year-old Phillip (T.J. Lowther) hostage. Tracking their flight is a Texas Ranger posse led by Eastwood, your basic righteous cowboy emeritus, and sparked by Laura Dern, a Governor's aide who brings feminist compassion and common sense to the pursuit. Bad guys, good guys, vroom-vroom, ho hum.

Not really -- because A Perfect World isn't a western Psycho, it's a warped Shane. In that 1953 film, mysterious gunslinger Alan Ladd agrees to protect a homesteader's family against varmints and becomes a reluctant role model for the tenderfoot's young son. Here, Haynes is the bad guy, but he's mainly Shane. When Terry puts the make on Phillip, Butch avenges the assault. He gives Phillip lessons in backwoods manhood: how to smoke, cuss, dance, romance a waitress, drive a car, steal a car, rob a store and, of course, point a loaded gun at people you don't like. It's the blind leading the blind: Butch is trying to become the father neither he nor the boy ever knew.

The movie also gives Butch enough psychological backstory to explain most of his antisocial excesses. Seems his mother was a prostitute and his dad "beat the hell out of anything he ever came across, or screwed, or fathered." As abused children become abusive adults, so poorly parented Butch turns into a lame excuse for a father to Phillip. But the boy is ready to learn from, idolize -- and finally stand up to -- the first man who has taken a paternal interest in him.

In his first stint as director since the Oscar-winning Unforgiven, Eastwood is pleased to let scenes amble in real Texas time, to let destiny fall slowly on Butch. Costner, though pulling a superficial switch on the pensive heroes he usually plays, is at such ease before the camera that Butch is made both compelling and agreeable. This World isn't perfect: it zigzags toward its climax and dodders in pathos when it gets there. But it's a handsome calling card for two Hollywood artists in prime form -- one at the high noon of stardom, the other in the tumbleweed afternoon of a distinguished career.