The movie 'A Perfect World': My father's tears in the theater and his thoughts on his late father.

Back then, Kevin Costner was incredibly cool and dashing.

'A Perfect World' movie review
My father's tears in the theater and his thoughts on his late father.

Back then, Kevin Costner was incredibly cool and dashing.

The Untouchables, The Bodyguard, JFK, Dances with Wolves, Field of Dreams, and, A Perfect World.

With Clint Eastwood's grounded direction, I think it's a human drama that slowly wells up in the climax.

Butch, played by Kevin Costner, was sent to prison for a minor crime in his teens and spent a long time there. He had no memories of his parents' love, and in his pocket, he kept a single, tattered postcard that his father had sent him from Alaska, the only one he ever received.

Escaping from that despair, he breaks out of prison and goes on the run, taking a young boy hostage. But that boy, too, had lived with a lack of affection. The boy isn't all that afraid of him. He doesn't seem to be desperate to escape, either. Perhaps in the boy's eyes, there wasn't the prejudice that the adults around him had, seeing him as merely a violent criminal.

Butch, who doesn't know what love is, gradually begins to feel something like fatherly affection. The flight of Butch, who grew up starved of a father's love, and the boy, who has no father, is both precarious and heartbreaking.

Meanwhile, the police chief, Eastwood, while chasing him, feels regret and a sense of atonement, believing that his own decision long ago to give him a harsher sentence to keep him away from a bad home environment had backfired.

These two men, bound by fate, look like father and son. The two of them chase and are chased, heading toward the end.

Despite his short temper and violent nature, Kevin Costner's presence and eyes, which reveal a humanity that purely seeks love deep down, are wonderful.

And I think the title 'A Perfect World' accentuates the poignancy of this story.

If this world were a perfect world... perhaps there would have been no crime, no prison, and no need for him to take a hostage.

In the second half of the story, there is a scene where he suddenly returns to his childhood and dances happily. It might have been a moment of a perfect world in his heart.

The climax: the two finally face each other in a meadow under a bright blue sky and the scorching sun.

Although I had predicted the ending, it was so heartbreaking that tears overflowed.

I watched it in the theater at the time because my father recommended it.

At that time, my father was working away from home and we didn't see each other much. When he came home after a long time, he told me that he had cried in the theater, even though he rarely watched movies.

My father lost his own father (my grandfather) at the age of five in the Pacific War. I was once shown a faded black-and-white photo of my grandfather in his military uniform holding my father on his lap. But he said he didn't remember him well.

I felt a certain distance from my father, but now that I am an adult, I feel that there may have been a difficulty in his relationship with his son, stemming from the fact that he had almost no memories of his own father.

I suspect that what captured my father's heart was how the yearning for a father's love, felt by Butch (Kevin Costner) and the boy, resonated with the ache in his own heart.

For those who are crying out for love deep within their hearts, this might be a film that strikes a painful chord.

But surely, isn't everyone who lives crying out for love in the depths of their soul?

It is a masterpiece that shakes the heart at its very core.