![]() (Much of the film’s story coincides with one character’s improbably long pregnancy.) Yet time has a funny way of catching up with some movies and The Postman seems like a more pointed, prescient film now than it did in 1997, when its very concept struck many as laughable. The film is filled with similar moments, scenes that threaten to tip over into pretension, and often do, and its deadly pace and other distracting details still prove frustrating. The mail gets picked up, and it’s depicted with the starry-eyed reverence of Robert Redford hitting a home run at the end of The Natural. Others pointed to the film’s inflated sense of self-importance, with Roger Ebert singling out a scene in which Costner’s character, after thundering past a kid (played by Costner’s son) who just misses the chance to hand him a letter, turns around as if spurred by “some sixth sense” then “gallop back to him, snatching up the letter at full tilt.” The action shifts to slow-motion. (Also, he looks amazing, apparently visiting a post-apocalyptic stylist between key scenes.) They owed him.Ĭritics weren’t nearly as accommodating, many using the film’s title and theme as an opportunity to trot out variations on “The Postman fails to deliver.” ( Horse & Rider magazine, however, did have a short item praising the star’s riding skills.) Some threw around the term “vanity project,” a tough-to-dispute accusation when leveled at a film in which Costner cast himself as a messianic figure, found small roles for each of his kids and sang a duet with Amy Grant over the closing credits. After all, he’d given the studio The Bodyguard, JFK, Tin Cup and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Waterworld’s bad buzz sounded like a gentle hum compared to what surrounded The Postman, which arrived dogged by stories of disastrous test screenings and Warner Bros.’ failed attempts to get Costner to cut the three-hour film to a more digestible length, pleas Costner’s A-list status gave him no reason to entertain. It ended up more-or-less breaking even, but rather than treating this as a bullet dodged, Costner used The Postman to revisit similar themes on dry land. The film seemed destined to go down as an expensive failure. Two years earlier Costner had starred in Waterworld, an ultra-expensive post-apocalyptic action film in which he played a loner who reluctantly becomes a savior. The Postman arrived in theaters as a wounded beast. Well, yes and no, and it’s easiest to start with the nos. government, then inadvertently starts a chain reaction in which a revived postal service becomes the vanguard in the fight against a fascist strongman? Were we too quick, then, to dismiss Costner’s vision of the far-off year of 2013 back in 1997, one in which he plays a drifter who takes a postman’s uniform from a corpse, uses it to scheme food and shelter from an unsuspecting town by claiming to be the representative of a restored U.S. If someone needed to, say, rebuild a collapsed civilization from the ground up, then swift, efficient, non-partisan mail delivery would have to be part of the plan. (Actually, you can pretty much scratch “may be” and “seems to feel” since President Trump has publicly copped to the plan, like a Bond villain confident he’s neutralized 007 and can share his evil schemes.) It turns out that, when it comes to democracy-sustaining institutions, the postal service is pretty fundamental. The United States Postal Service recently became the subject of one alarming news item after another thanks to outrage that the Trump administration may be doing its best to sabotage it as a way of suppressing voting by mail, a practice it seems to feel will hurt its chances for reelection. Who wanted to see a movie that used the postal service as a stand-in for all that was good, right and equitable about the United States of America anyway? What possible relevance could that have?Īs recent events have shown, well, quite a lot actually. ![]() Soon it would serve as an instant punchline, or an example of a star’s ego run amok. By the end of the week, it had lost even that edge. The Postman opened in eighth place on Christmas, barely beating out a live-action adaptation of Mr. Overwhelmingly, however, they opted not to. If none of those appealed, they could check out recent releases like the James Bond sequel Tomorrow Never Dies or Titanic, the latter in its second week of release and already well on its way to becoming the most financially successful movie of all time (for a while, anyway).Īlternatively, they could see another high-profile release, a three-hour post-apocalyptic drama starring and directed by Kevin Costner, stepping behind the camera for the first time since the Best Picture-winning Dances With Wolves. Brooks’ As Good as It Gets, Quentin Tarantino’s much-anticipated Pulp Fiction followup Jackie Brown and, in select theaters, Kundun and Wag the Dog. ![]() On Christmas Day 1997, moviegoers had an embarrassment of enticing options.
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