IN DEFENSE OFThe Postman

Hollywood can be so cruel. Remember how Mary Reilly and I Love Trouble quickly snuffed out the excitement for Julia Roberts back in the 90s? Before that, for nearly a decade Burt Reynolds was the top box-office draw before fading to obscurity on the boob tube. And then there’s Kevin Costner. Once considered the renaissance man of the new Hollywood, Kevin quickly sank and arguably never recovered from a highly underrated lead role in an Ishtar called Waterworld. To truly appreciate what could have been the final nail in the coffin of Costner, let’s take a look at The Postman (Warner Bros., 1997).


In hindsight, how there ever was a bidding war over the rights to David Brin’s original novel might be the first place to start questioning Costner’s first directorial effort since Dances with Wolves. The Postman, with a budget of $80 million, grossed only $5 million opening weekend. It opened to scathing reviews that made Waterworld pale in comparison (especially considering the final Waterworld gross of $264 million Worldwide). Nevertheless, it’s not a good thing when you’ve got the crew cursing the film during production as “Dirt World.”

The Postman is yet another variation on the post-apocalyptic genre (get it, “post-man?"), but you could really also look at it as a big-budget Hollywood epic with a non-traditional setting and subject matter. That is, if you’re not looking at it as an unintentional comedy-spoof of big-budget Hollywood epics, which it seems most critics experienced.

What I found fascinating rewatching it nearly 12 years later is how many of the visuals in The Postman seem to have inspired the production design in post-1997 movies. I swear there are some visual sequences later lifted for I Am Legend, Castaway, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and Doomsday to name a few. Distracted by the films faults, critics failed to respond to its successfully controlled imagery. Visually, Costner’s direction comes across as a true labor of love. He speaks the language of American wide-screen cinema.

Where The Postman seems to fail, lies in its own over-ambition. The script, co-written by Gump and Benjamin Button screenwriter Eric Roth, is sentimentality presumptuous , only to be rescued occasionally by actors rising above laughable dialogue (I said, occasionally). Interestingly the film's running time at nearly three hours feels too short to tell the complete story, or even engage the audience with any interest in the characters. The film feels disjointed at times, especially from the get-go, with flash-forwards due to Costner having to cut down the length of an initial cut. And worst of all, the production is overly conscious to hit you over the head with its the back-to-basics future society setting. In a post-nuclear war land, dirty-brown is the new black. The best laugh is saved for the tacked on happy-ending, where future Americans can once more wear bright pastel colored clothes.

I place The Postman into the guilty pleasure category of bad movies. It's nowhere near "unwatchable," and there's enough to admire in the film to make you overlook its faults. I've always found Costner to be a compelling movie star and was surprised that Mr. Brooks didn't necessarily put him back on the A list. As a director, he's made a handful of interesting movies, hitting a zenith with his first and never rebounding.

Nowadays, it's really hard not to cringe when watching a key scene in The Postman. About midway through there's a great metaphor for the post-apocalyptic Costner career. In one of the most out-there cameo appearances rocker Tom Petty shows up as, well, Tom Petty-survivor of the nuclear future. When the postman runs into Petty, he pauses and then exclaims “I know you…you’re famous.”

Petty looks Costner in the eye and says, “I was once, sorta. Not anymore.”