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The Postman
Starring Kevin Costner, Will Patton, Olivia Williams, Tom Petty, James Russo Directed by Kevin Costner Theatrical Release: 1997 When Kevin Costner reveals how exactly he came to be a postman, he openly admits that he’s not sure if the story will make one laugh or cry. He delivers this statement with such out-of-place seriousness in this ludicrous, futuristic farce that the audience has no choice but to laugh. Directed by Costner himself, The Postman is a futuristic tale set in the year 2013, following a war that has destroyed the USA. What’s left is dysfunctional civilization spread out into a rag-tag group of settlements with nothing in the way of modern technology. (This structure invites comparison with The Road Warrior, a much more violent, but still a much better film.) With no formal means of communication, the remaining population has no formal government to lead them and no means of discovering what is going on around the country. Consequently, it is vulnerable to all forms of violent authority seekers. For instance, a former photocopier repairman (yes, photocopier repairman), who calls himself General Bethlehem assembles an army and with it he manages to terrorize the country. Costner’s character is a wanderer who is captured by Bethlehem’s army. When he finally manages to escape he discovers the remains of a postal worker. Costner steals his uniform and presents himself to a small village as a postal worker for the re-established government. The people, obviously eager for news from the surrounding settlements, immediately welcome him. Costner is easily able to convince them of the legitimacy of his wholly imaginary reformed government. Costner plays the charade of being a postman and by doing so he gives the people hope. Miraculously and somehow accidently, he manages to re-establish the postal system and the government that he’s fictitiously created. After all of this he becomes, what else, a national hero! Sound ridiculous? You betcha! Forget Waterworld as Kevin Costner’s biggest embarrassment, this one takes the prize. The success of the film hinges, in large part, on the audiences’ acceptance of the key premise that the postman is the foremost symbol of structure and cohesiveness in our society. Forget religion, forget food and water, forget everything. When one has a postman, who needs anything else? And if you buy that then you’ve obviously never tried to send a letter from Ottawa to Toronto -- a trip that takes four hours by car and two weeks by mail! This movie is a far cry from Costner’s Dances With Wolves, an outstanding movie with a grand-sense of scale and effective story telling. The Postman may also be a mega-budget epic, but the similarities end there. Besides the ridiculous plot, the film lacks originality. It repeats elements from numerous other movies in this genre such as The Road Warrior, Blade Runner and A Boy and His Dog. Furthermore, The Postman doesn’t seem to know whether it’s a comedy or drama. It seems instead to be a messy combination of both. This hybrid leaves viewers arguing about exactly what it was the directors were trying to accomplish. Although the script is written with what are supposed to be funny pop-culture references and off-the-wall characters, the movie attempts to simultaneously play them as serious characters. The audience is simply left shaking their heads and snickering, not at the situations but at the preposterous nature of it all. And what really doesn’t make any sense in a movie that really makes no sense at all is that the time-frame is placed a scant fifteen years into the future. Apparently there are people there who lived through this supposed war that destroyed everything. In fact, one character tells Costner’s character that he used to be an esteemed engineer that worked on space projects. What happened in the war, did it fry everyone’s brains too? They now live in the most rudimentary ways and don’t even seem smart enough to rig up a tin can and a string to talk to each other. Instead, they bumble around like automatons and we’re supposed to believe that it takes Costner’s wisecracking postman to bring this civilization back together? Leave it to Hollywood to produce a movie with both a terrible script and outstanding technical merit. The picture and the sound are first rate. The video transfer is gorgeous with wonderful color rendition and beautiful clarity. Colors are extraordinary at times and they effectively demonstrate the splendid cinematography. The only real DVD glitch is the visible layer change. However, the change appropriately occurs when nothing is actually happening and when the image is still so there is little distraction. The soundtrack has an expansive quality that completely surrounds the listener. Surround effects are extremely effective and the music, which is primarily orchestral, is spread across the stage so that it gives the film a huge sense of scope and impact. The DVD extras are decent. The most notable is the short documentary on the making of some of the special effects. Although the inclusion of these extras is appreciated, the problem here is that although the film is quite well made (at least from a technical point of view), the effects themselves are nothing special and they certainly don’t warrant any special attention. A movie like The Matrix deserves this type of attention. This film doesn’t. Although The Postman is so bad and so ridiculous, it still has one redeeming quality. It is so bad that I laughed out loud enough times to encourage me to bump up its rating by one half a star. So, if for no other reason than to see a one-man ego trip star and direct (and strategically place almost all of his own family members) in one of Hollywood’s biggest flops of all-time, watch The Postman. At least it is good for a laugh. Do you want to watch this at home? GO TO |
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January 2000
