THE POSTMAN MOVIE

Costner could have trimmed a good hour from this three-hours-plus monster and had a much more robust story.

THE POSTMAN MOVIE

There’s a good movie buried somewhere in The Postman - no, really. Why didn’t the little boy - who was excited by the prospect of mailing his letter - run out to meet the postman once he’d stopped? Why didn’t the postman just trot back to meet the boy? Costner doesn’t care - he’s more interested in style over substance. The fact that the boy and the postman are doing things that make no sense whatsoever doesn’t seem to have crossed Costner’s mind. The postman, who was in a hurry when he passed the house the first time, now must stop his horse again, turn around, and race back in the other direction, past the boy’s house yet again.Ĭostner, who directed and produced The Postman, knew the power of the image he was creating here - in the final scene of the film, grateful citizens erect a memorial to the postman commemorating that very moment. There the scene ends, so we must conjecture what happens next. The postman turns his horse around, forces his mount into a run, and races past the boy to grab his letter. But the postman stops - he’s seen the boy. See, the boy actually misses the postman riding by - by the time he runs into the road, the postman has already overshot the house by hundreds of yards. It was a dramatic and mythopoeic moment.īut this scene in the context of the film exemplifies everything that’s wrong with The Postman. A young boy, standing by the side of a dirt road, holds a letter in the air for Kevin Costner‘s postman to snatch as he gallops by on his horse. There’s a beautiful image I remember from the preview for The Postman.