Review // THE POSTMAN - Kevin Costner saves America by delivering letters

This is a very special review for me, I finally finished this movie after re-watching it in little doses over the last month and a half. I have a lot of history with The Postman. When I was in high school, I worked in a very old, very cool movie theatre on the main street of my hometown called The Regent. http://www.theregenttheatre.org/ This was a very magical place for me and I'll save my Regent Love Letter for another post, but needless to say I watched a ton of movies while working there and The Postman was one of them.

We normally couldn't get first run movies at the Regent; it only has 1 screen, it's in a town of about 4500 people and we didn't really have any clout with the distributors. We typically had to wait at least 3 weeks to a month before pulling in the top Hollywood fare. But for some odd reason Warner Brothers let us have The Postman on opening day. Hmm...strange.

In the week that we ran it, I probably watched it 2 full times (that's 6 hours of Postman for anybody counting) and then just wandered in and out of it for another 5-6 screenings, catching my favourite parts. I was a big Waterworld fan so I was excited that Costner was going back to the post-apocalyptic well. Waterworld was fun and funny, driven into all sorts of ridiculous places by Costner's powerful ego. The Postman is on a whole other level though.

Directed, produced and starring Kevin Costner, The Postman is one of the all-time greats among misguided vanity projects. Costner even contributes a fucking duet over the credits with shitty 90's pop chick Amy Grant, the very lyrics of which act as a paean to Costner's incredible virtue. The entire movie exists to extol the heroism, altruism and good hair of Costner, every minute of its 3 HOUR running time!

Costner plays a wasteland drifter who gets forcibly drafted into the army of tyrannical warlord, Bethlehem (Will Patton). He soon escapes though and in the middle of a frigid rainstorm, comes across shelter and warm clothes in the form of a crashed mail truck and the skeleton of a postman. With the postal uniform fitting nicely, Costner decides to pretend to be a real Postman, claiming to be a representative of the restored United States Government in order to gain food and shelter from charitable villages. Not only does this work, but the sight of Costner in uniform gives everyone who sees him an earth-shattering hopegasm.

Before you know it, people have gone totally postal and start swearing themselves in as letter-carriers, with routes opening up across the countryside. The simple act of sending and receiving letters snowballs into a bright light of hope shining through the chaos. Soon townsfolk have found the courage to stand up to the murderous Bethlehem. Costner as the original Postman, is not just a hero to the people, he's basically a god, the only one who can usher the country out of this dark age.

In the climactic battle, hundreds of post-people, armed and on horseback are led by Costner in a face-off against Bethlehem's army. Costner asks the question "Wouldn't it be great if wars were fought just by the assholes that started them?" And so instead of a large-scale epic battle, we instead get Costner and Will Patton rolling around on the ground in slow-motion to straining orchestra strings. And I literally mean rolling around. There is no real fight choreography or excitement. It looks like a bar fight where both combatants are too drunk to even throw a punch. It's fucking hilarious and utterly anti-climactic after 3 fucking hours of build-up.

The Postman was savaged by critics and ignored by audiences. I think it lost something like 60 million dollars. I wish I could say it was embraced by junk-hounds, but aside from my friend Andrew (who has a laminated Postman poster hanging on his beer fridge) and I, I've yet to find a cult who belong to this movie. From a normal critical perspective, The Postman is obviously a gross failure. It's sentimentality, syrupy storyline and indulgent length would test the patience of all but the most devout Costner fan (if such a think existed) . For connoisseurs of bad cinema like myself, its a delight, but at 3 hours, impossible to sustain the stoned WTF-ness of watching Costner use an 80 million dollar movie to jerk himself off.

There are so many astoundingly hilarious moments of hubris in this film it would be impossible to list them all, but here are some of my favourites:

-Local town hottie Olivia Williams slow dances with Costner at a village jamboree and she looks him in the eyes and says "I want your seed."

-Costner performs Hamlet to an adoring crowd. Hamlet! Kevin Costner!

-I counted five separate times when characters saluted Costner with tears of admiration in their eyes.

-Costner casts his own teenaged daughter as a fellow letter carrier and in one scene shows her trying to work up the nerve to act on her crush and ask him to dance. His own daughter!!!

-And this, hands down the funniest scene in the movie:


Ok, some Youtube asshole pulled this clip so I'll have to describe it: In slow motion, accompanied by the sound of an orchestra having an emotional breakdown, Kevin Costner on horseback rides by a kid and grabs a letter out of his hand. This simple act of grabbing the letter is meant to represent Costner's selfless contribution to the salvation of humanity. We know this because it dissolves into the future, civilization has been restored and a bunch of white people are unveiling a bronzed statue of Costner in the act of receiving that symbolic letter from the little kid. A grown man (who looks remarkably similar to Costner) sniffles at the sight of the bronzed kid and says "that was me". It's amazing, trust me.

I really hope that Kevin Costner kept that statue and has it somewhere on his Aspen ranch. I can just picture him wandering outside on a summer night, scotch in hand to sit beneath it, staring up at his bronzed likeness and reminiscing on a time in his career when he had so much power he was allowed to direct, produce and star in 3 hour love letters to himself. It must have been a glorious time for him. But really, in retrospect, he probably should've just made another baseball movie. A 3 hour baseball movie. Oh shit!

In a world where chaos reigns, one man will keep hope alive... by playing baseball. Kevin Costner is The Pitcher.