Word: script
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...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...
...actors do their best to maintain some sort of serio-dramatic tone throughout the play. Without a strong script and meaningful character development, players are forced to rely on exaggerated gestures and movement to get their points across. Perhaps overemphasizing Merlyn's innocence, James Patterson, as the title character, remains wideeyed and blank-faced during most of the play. David Travis as Theloc, Merlyn's Obi-Wan Kenobi-like guru, manages to make the best of the show's most preposterous fortune-cookie-like lines. Sometimes, however, Travis, in an effort to maintain some sort of credibility for his character...
...plot's weaknesses are punctuated by the script's unbelievably stilted nature. The lines delivered are not normal dialogue: What would normally be inferred from speech has become speech itself. When a character acts haughtily, another points to him and says, "He is arrogant." In discussing Merlyn's ability to use his power for evil, a character simply says, "He is a bad man." The absence of finesse and subtlety in the script manages to deflate most scenes, transforming supposedly serious scenes into laughable displays of overacting. Consequently, Merlyn has the dramatic tension of a "Saved by the Bell" episode...
Only two thespians save this horrible script. As Cardinal Richelieu, Tim Curry actually pulls off his lines sometimes. When he orders to death a poor man, guilty of stealing to feed his family, his reasoning of "One less mouth to feed" does send shivers down one's spine. And as Porthos, Oliver Platt is so infectuously jolly and impish in places that we cannot help but giggle at idiotic exchanges such...
Brian De Palma has, of course, seen Angels with Dirty Faces and The Roaring Twenties. No director knows the traditions of the violent genres better or is better at bringing them back to rushing life. And in Carlito's Way David Koepp has given him a script that works smart variants on the gangster film's classic conventions. Early on we find Carlito in court, about to be sprung after serving just five years of a 30-year rap, making a grandiose speech thanking everyone who has helped him. It's a fine bit, which, as the judge sourly comments...