entertainment

‘The Postman’ fails to deliver

By Gordon Flurkey ⋅ March 11, 1998 ⋅  Email this article ⋅  Print this article ⋅ Post a comment

Kevin Costner should be kept away from the director’s chair. After the fiasco that was Waterworld, he took the chair again and the result is The Postman, yet another study of Mr. Costner largely being overwhelmed by his desire to repeat the fluke success of Dances With Wolves.

To state the obvious: The Postman is long and slow. Actually, make that mindlessly long, and needlessly slow. What’s worse, it is pious and repetitious. Long, slow movies are tolerable; in fact they often win Oscars (Dances With Wolves). But piety and repetition in a long and slow movie has been proven to be a really bad idea. Costner should watch Waterworld if he hasn’t seen it yet.

The year is 2013, the place America, post-apocalypse. Kevin Costner plays a nameless drifter who wanders the wasteland, going from ragged settlement to ragged settlement, earning his supper by performing Shakespeare. Early on, he is taken prisoner by an immense militia that terrorizes the countryside–”The Force of the Eight,” led by a white supremacist who calls himself Bethlehem (Will Paton). These early scenes, and the chronicle of our hero’s escape, work well enough. The slow pace helps create a believably large, difficult environment for the story to take place in; we understand these folks are in need of a savior.

After a while though, it appears the script is in need of one, too; but alas, it’s too late. Costner escapes, and accidentally comes across the skeleton of a U.S. mailman, whose uniform is still in good shape. So he wears the costume and delivers the mail, which has gone undelivered since the catastrophes of 1998, to the people it’s addressed to in the nearby settlement. His goal is to cadge a free meal, so he lies, telling everybody that the United States government has been restored. They are desperate to believe him, and they load him down with more mail to deliver on his way to the neighboring villages. A young black kid named Ford Lincoln Mercury
(Larenz Tate) asks to be sworn in as deputy postman; and a beautiful woman, Abby (Olivia Williams), asks to be impregnated. Our hero obliges and, embarrassed, skips town.

From this point on, The Postman feels like a Frank Capra movie on very bad acid. Like the “John Doe” society in Capra’s Meet John Doe, “Postmen of the Restored United States” spring up everywhere–a phenomenon beyond the control of our hero. He’s ultra-thick about comprehending it, too. Abby, now his love interest and faithful scold, gives him several lengthy speeches to the effect of, “Don’t you understand? You’ve given us all hope!”

Indeed, this idea is reiterated ad nauseam.

Even during the climactic showdown with the army of white supremacists–in one-on-one, hand-to-hand combat–Bethlehem makes a speech of impressive duration, forming whole sentences that he patiently completes in those tiny breathspaces when Costner isn’t trying to wipe him out.

This aspect of the movie is almost laughable, but by this point, even laughter requires more energy than Costner’s self-aggrandizing hodgepodge leaves you with.

Grade: C-