Raspberry Picking: The Postman (1997)

Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. Today we’ve got a visit from The Postman, nominee for five Razzie Awards, winner of all five including Worst Picture, Worst Actor, and Worst Director, and loser of more than $60 million and Kevin Costner’s reputation.

Hey, remember Kevin Costner? 

Y’all just got tired of him, didn’t you?

In 1990, Costner’s directorial debut Dances with Wolves, a three-hour epic in which he played a handsome antiheroic lone wolf, made him a darling of critics and especially audiences and nabbed him a big bundle of Oscars and other prizes. It didn’t last long. 1994’s Wyatt Earp, a three-hour epic starring Costner as a handsome antiheroic lone wolf, failed to impress critics or audiences and fizzled out at the box office. 1995’s Waterworld, a two-and-a-half-hour epic starring Costner as a handsome antiheroic lone wolf, lost even more money due to a jaw-droppingly wasteful production. Most of that waste took the form of Costner demanding changes to the production and making everyone around him miserable.

So in 1997, Costner must have looked at the data and figured he’d found the missing ingredient in these critically-disdained flops. He slid back into the director’s chair – and the starring role, natch – for a long-awaited adaptation of David Brin’s post-apocalyptic novel The Postman.

Everything seemed to be going so well. Brin liked Costner and liked his vision for the film and its main character. Costner worked with screenwriter Brian Helgeland to salvage a script by Eric Roth that had become notorious around Hollywood, legendarily scaring Ron Howard and Tom Hanks away from their own attempt at the project. The cost, at $80 million, was a modest fraction of the bottomless money pit that Waterworld had been.

But Costner just couldn’t help himself. The 177-minute film bombed at test screenings, and Warner Brothers begged Costner to cut the movie into something more reasonable. He refused, citing his “principles,” whatever that means. And when The Postman arrived in theaters in the same December Oscarbait season as Titanic (which was busy breaking the box office records held by Dances With Wolves), everyone who didn’t hate it promptly ignored it. From its mediocre opening weekend, it plunged into a death spiral, eventually pulling in about $20 million domestic. Costner wouldn’t sit in a director’s chair again until 2003’s Open Range, and hasn’t done so since.

But despite everything, Costner defends the film and looks back fondly on it. It has its defenders and quasi-defenders, Stephen Colbert among them (don’t watch that clip, it’s insufferable). The idea of a delivery boy as a force for community-building in a fractured world has even stuck around in the public imagination enough for Kojima Hideo to make a massive and clinically insane video game about it.

So what’s the buzz on The Postman? Costner’s misunderstood magnum opus? An epic misfire?

THE STORY

I should have known I was going to love this stupid movie. I’ve always been a big softie for Waterworld despite suspecting it of not being very good. And The Postman is better than Waterworld in just about every way.

A title card tells us that it’s the distant future, the year 2013, after the end of some nondescript world war. An unnamed drifter (Costner) roams around a post-apocalyptic wasteland that used to be the northwestern United States with his mule, Bill, the best character in the first hour of the movie. Briefly, I thought the movie was just going to be Kevin Costner wandering around the desert talking to his mule and occasionally delivering a package, and I got very excited. I would still like someone to make this movie.

Unfortunately, the rest of the plot arrives in due time. A roving militia of tyrants and bandits called the Holnists, named for their founder/inspiration Nathan Holn, about whom we learn nothing beyond his name, arrives in the same locale where the drifter is performing one-man Shakespeare plays – really – for food and supplies. Under the leadership of the cruel, sadistic, all-around-lousy General Bethlehem (Will Patton), they ride from town to town collecting tributes from the locals and conscripts for their army of cruel, sadistic, all-around-lousy racist troglodytes.

The drifter gets conscripted into the Holnist army and makes a quick nemesis of Bethlehem, but he escapes in a rather tedious sequence involving a lion that ends with him hiding in an abandoned postal truck. He grabs a bag of mail, puts on the dusty USPS cap and jacket that he finds on a science-classroom model skeleton in the driver’s seat, and heads for the cozy town of Pineview, figuring (correctly) that he can con his way into a bath, a place to stay, and maybe even some lady panties if he can convince them that he’s a real postman and, therefore, a representative of a re-forming US government.

At the entrance to Pineview, savvy Sheriff Briscoe (Daniel von Bargen) sees easily through the Postman’s ruse, but he wiggles his way into the town anyway when he presents a letter to elderly, blind Irene March (Roberta Maxwell) from her long-lost daughter. He meets Abby (Olivia Williams) a local beauty who wants to sleep with him, but not for the reasons he thinks; and Johnny Stevens, a.k.a. Ford Lincoln Mercury (Larenz Tate), a teenager who dreams of driving racecars until he meets the Postman, at which point he decides that working for the postal service is the coolest thing anyone could possibly do. The confused Postman hurriedly “inducts” Ford as a postman, and as he takes off for nearby Benning following a Holnist raid, Ford sets about recruiting more mail carriers, and the United States Postal Service turns into an honest-to-god group of guerilla revolutionaries that stands up to the tyranny of the Holnists and works to rebuild These United States from the ground.

I could go on, but I’m trying to stop this summary from turning into a college term paper.

THE BAD

It’s so long. It’s so goddamn long.

Look, movie length has its own laws of relativity. Some movies are too long at 95 minutes. Other movies are too short at 170 minutes. (All movies between 135 and 159 minutes are too long, but that’s a rant for another day.) The Postman runs just shy of three hours, and for this story, that runtime feels like a punishment. It’s long, it’s slow, and it’s astonishingly self-indulgent for Costner. That’s not a good combination.

Usually, when discussing where fat could have been trimmed, people like to pick on the romantic subplot between the Postman and Abby. That’s not undeserved. Their relationship has no stakes and little bearing on the main conflict, not to mention it’s a waste of a character whose early development pointed to much bigger and better things.  Poor Abby’s legacy ends up being the movie’s second-biggest unintentional laugh when she has to tell the Postman that he “give[s] out hope like it’s candy in [his] pocket.”

But I’ve got a better idea: cut the first hour. 

In fact, cut almost everything involving the Holnists. Nearly everything involving them is wretched. Every time the bastards show up, the movie’s momentum shudders to a halt. I would so much rather watch Costner talk to Bill the Mule (or deliver mail, or make out with Abby, or scratch his personal regions) than watch him catfight with these generic Nazi-Klan bad guys. I hate to be so dismissive of Will Patton, who has great screen presence as Bethlehem, but is a desolate postwar wasteland full of desperate people not itself a big enough obstacle to overcome? 

Another way to trim some wasted frames would be to cut way down on the liberal use of slow motion, which Costner uses to let us know – because how would be we able to tell otherwise? – that something Very Big and Important is happening. The most famous, and most embarrassing, of these moments is when the Postman just misses accepting a letter from a little boy, then turns around and rides very dramatically back on his horse to take a letter from the boy’s hand. At the end of the movie, this moment is captured forever in statue form, in a reveal guaranteed to split even the strongest sides.

You could also cut several scenes that rely on remarkably bad green screen effects. The Postman’s escape from Holnist fire in a town on the Hoover Dam by flying across the dam in a makeshift gondola is the worst of these offenders, but Costner spends an unfortunate amount of time in epic Pacific Northwest landscapes that look more like mid-grade theme park simulators. That The Postman was released right next to Titanic was unfortunate for several reasons, but compared to the astonishing CG centerpiece of that other movie, those effects might be the greatest misfortune of all.

At least the climactic and warp-speed Final Showdown is only about five minutes long. Oh, and Tom Petty’s in the movie, playing both himself and the mayor of that greenscreen town on the Hoover Dam. That’s apparently very important to a lot of viewers. If that’s you, I’m happy for you.

THE GOOD

So that’s an awful lot of nonsense packed into three hours. But the advantage of that three-hour run time is that the nonsense doesn’t make up anywhere close to the whole thing. And in spite of all its enormous, ugly warts, I dug the hell out of this silly movie.

Let’s start with the technical merits. To contrast with the terrible green screen, there is some really pretty cinematography in this movie. Stephen Windon, who would later shoot most of the Fast and the Furious franchise, imbues the smaller locations with charm and character. The town of Pineview is especially successful, full of soft light and shadow that renders it homey and slightly sinister at the same time. An epic movie also needs a big world to connect all these little towns, and the world of The Postman feels huge. It’s easy for those of us who live in the eastern US to forget how enormous the states in the Western part of our country are, and how much space there is. The Postman never lets us forget the sheer size of the United States, and how difficult it would be to get a message from one end to the other without the technology we take for granted.

As for performances…Costner’s decent. I’m indifferent toward him as a rule, and I don’t think he’s terribly convincing as a dashing hero. The Internet tells me that Costner’s original plan was to cast himself as General Bethlehem, and if I think about that possibility too hard, I might rupture my own spleen from laughter. The Postman is not an especially likable man, much as the script wants him to be, and he and his many subplots spend a generous portion of the film wasting everyone’s time. But Costner is pretty darn good at playing a whiny putz who gets to ride the glittering wave of heroism pouring from the people around him, and that’s what The Postman actually needs him to be. He also, much to his credit, never lets himself look fully comfortable riding that glittering wave of heroism.

The major purveyor of that heroism, and the film’s MVP, is Larenz Tate as Ford Lincoln Mercury. Tate oozes gee-whiz boyish enthusiasm and wide-eyed idealism in such overwhelming quantities that you’ll feel bad if you don’t forgive Ford for how dumb and gullible the script needs him to be. He made me root for the United States federal government, a feat that should be impossible. And because he starts out as such a Saturday-morning-cartoon boy hero, later in the film when the cost of his heroism comes due for him, it’s moving. If there were justice in this movie’s universe, the statue at the end would have been of Ford and the captured California postman he meets in Bethlehem’s camp (Greg Serano) shaking hands as they believe they’re both about to be executed.

If Costner does nothing for you, I get it. But if you can watch Tate proudly declare himself “Postmaster Ford Lincoln Mercury” and not smile a little, you are an old poop.  And that’s the major selling point of The Postman: it’s so, so sweet. It exudes the pride and joy of a child riding a bicycle for the first time. It takes the atmosphere of dread and hopelessness that usually accompanies apocalypse art, tosses it out the window, and replaces it with one of optimism and kindness.

Elsewhere in the cast, Will Patton is having way too much fun stalking about as the dastardly General Bethlehem, a zero-dimensional villain if we ever saw one. There’s nothing to write home about here, but he’s fun to watch, and we need to have fun during as many of these 177 minutes as we can. Olivia Williams, bless her, brings purposeful determination to a character who didn’t need to exist. Her first and best scene, in which Abby appears to be flirting with the Postman at an outdoor dance only to reveal that she and her infertile husband Michael (Charles Esten) want him as a sperm donor, is also one of the cleverest in the film. Williams brings lightly amused detachment to Abby’s interactions with the Postman, contrasted with a sweet adoration the moment the extremely ordinary Michael walks into the frame. It’s a cute subversion of pretty-girl-as-hero’s-prize, marred only slightly by every single other interaction between the Postman and Abby.

So why did it fall to The Postman to become the Joke Movie of 1997? Part of it was certainly Costner Fatigue Syndrome. But I also think – and there’s no way for me to not sound ridiculous saying this – The Postman was ahead of its time. 

In 1997, most people in the US still didn’t use email. In 1997, the most common feeling toward the mail was frustration at its slowness, its rising cost, and the growing amount of junk stuffed in everyone’s mailbox. Certainly nobody felt nostalgia for the mail. Certainly we were not mired in an ongoing global catastrophe that caused many people to suffer profound, debilitating feelings of isolation. Contrast that with 2022, when some of my teenage students have begun mailing each other cards for fun, and when the idea of tangible, real-world interaction with loved ones feels more precious and sacred than it has in a long time. When we’ve had a mass rediscovery of how much people need other people. Consider all that and tell me The Postman wouldn’t have warmed everybody’s heart like a big hot cup of cocoa and marshmallows if it had come out in 2021.

So yes, I am a sucker. Yes, I fell hard for Kevin Costner’s emotional manipulation. Yes, the movie is hideously bloated and often unintentionally funny and moves at the pace of a drunk snail. But I simply cannot get over what a big heart it has. It’s like letting a litter of red, white, and blue puppies crawl all over you and lick your face for three hours. The Postman loves you, almost as much as it loves itself. It wants you to feel good, to feel safe and secure knowing that not even a civilization-ending war could take away what is really great about These United States. How much it reaches you may depend very much on how receptive you are to that message. On the other hand, I am a government-hating libertoid who thinks the post office should be privatized, so maybe you just have to turn certain parts of yourself off for a bit. I encourage you to do so if you watch The Postman.

Besides, in addition to the postal service, another thing some of us feel nostalgic for in The Year of Our Lord 2022 is movies that don’t have a cynical bone in their bodies. Big tentpole mainstream movies that aren’t snark-splattered anti-comedies, misery porn, or sermons disguised as entertainment. The Postman comes from a sweeter, softer place in the emotional realm to which movies transport us – the sort of place the Razzies like to smear feces all over – and it’s a place where I don’t mind spending some quality time. Though maybe not 177 minutes worth.

Quality of Movie: 4 / 5. Probably 3 or 3.5, if I were being honest, but screw it, I feel nice.

Quality of Experience: 4 / 5. Brace yourself for the length, then have a good time.

Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida.  She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects.  You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog!  You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.