The Postman (1997) Review
5/10
Fifteen years after a war and a plague, a drifter finds a dead postal worker in a wrecked van, takes the uniform and the mailbag for the warmth, and tells a walled town he’s carrying letters for a restored government that doesn’t exist.
The 5 is a real number and not a joke. The premise is excellent, the photography is beautiful, and the central idea, that a lie about a functioning country can bring the country back, is worth three hours in the right hands.
I want to like this movie a lot more than it lets me. The first hour has me hooked on a drifter accidentally rebuilding a country, and then Costner decides his postman was a saint all along, and I spend the next two hours waiting for the story I was promised to come back. The tone is what sinks it. David Brin wrote a book in which the postman is a fraud who’s horrified by what his fraud becomes. Costner filmed a man who’s right, good, and eventually commemorated in bronze.
The Premise Is Great
A man puts on a uniform to stay warm and discovers that the uniform means something. People believe him because they want to, and the belief starts producing the thing it describes.
That’s a serious idea about institutions. A government is a story enough people agree to act on, and a man delivering letters between towns is performing the story until it becomes essential. The film understands this and stages it well in the first hour. The scene where a boy runs alongside a horse to hand over a letter is the whole thesis and it works. So does the moment the postman realizes people are waiting for him, and that he can’t stop without taking something away from them.
The recruitment sequence is the other good one. Young people start putting on uniforms and riding routes because he did, and the organization is real before the authority behind it is. That’s exactly how these things happen. Larenz Tate carries most of that thread as Ford Lincoln Mercury, a young carrier who takes the idea more seriously than its inventor does. He’s the film’s most useful character, because a believer who outruns the con is the pressure that should have been squeezing the protagonist for three hours.
An imposter story only works if the imposture produces real consequences the imposter didn’t intend. The fraud has to escape him.
That requires the protagonist to lose control of his own lie early. Once other people are acting on it, the story has an engine that doesn’t depend on whether he’s caught.
The failure mode is a con man who’s secretly the right man for the job. It converts a story about institutions into a story about a hero being discovered. That’s a much smaller idea.
The Satire Got Removed
Brin’s 1985 novel is pointed. The postman is a survivor who lies to eat, the restored government is a fiction he keeps having to maintain, and the book is interested in what it costs a man to become a symbol he knows is false.
The film keeps the plot and removes the irony. Costner’s postman is decent from the start, uncomfortable with the deception in a way that reads as modesty, and vindicated completely by the end.
That change is the single decision everything else follows from. Without the fraud being a real fraud, the three hour running time is spent on a good man doing good things in beautiful landscapes. That isn’t a story.
The Bethlehem material tries to supply the missing conflict. Will Patton is good as a former copier salesman running a militia on a philosophy he read in a book, and he’s the film’s best invention, because he’s also a man who became a symbol by claiming to be one.
That parallel is the film the material wanted to be.
Two men in the ruins, both of them frauds, both of them running organizations built on invented authority, and only one of them lying in a direction that helps anybody. The script sets it up and then declines to let the postman be a fraud. That removes the comparison entirely.
This is the choice that frustrates me most. Will Patton hands the film its best argument on a plate, two frauds in the ruins with only one of them lying in a useful direction, and the script throws it away to keep its hero clean. I’d have traded the whole pregnancy subplot for ten more minutes of those two men sizing each other up.
The Statue
The film ends years later with a bronze statue of the postman being unveiled, depicting the moment the boy handed him the letter, while his now grown daughter gives a speech. It’s the single most discussed thing about the picture and the discussion is fair. A film directed by and starring the same man, about a man who saves America, can’t end with a monument to him without the audience noticing who built it.
The defense is that the statue is about the idea instead of the person, and the film says so. The trouble is that a bronze Kevin Costner is on screen for a long time while somebody explains his importance, and no amount of framing survives that.
I laughed at the statue, and I don’t think the film wanted me to. A director unveiling a bronze of himself as the man who saved America is the kind of choice somebody on that production should have talked him out of.
What makes it worse is that Brin’s ending is available and better. The novel is far more interested in what happens to a symbol after the crisis passes, and the film reaches for permanence where the book reached for doubt.
Be careful when the story’s assessment of a character matches your own position in the production. An author writing a novelist hero, or a director playing a savior, has to work twice as hard to make the praise land as observation.
The test is whether anybody in the work is permitted to be right about the protagonist’s flaws at the end. Here nobody is. That’s what tips the sincerity into something else.
Endings that commemorate are almost always weaker than endings that continue. A monument closes the question of what the character meant, and the reader would rather keep arguing about it.
It Is Beautiful and Far Too Long
Stephen Windon shot it across the Pacific Northwest, and it’s gorgeous to look at. Empty highways, dead towns, mountain passes with snow, and a scale that makes the walking feel like real distance. Whatever else goes wrong in this picture, I never once got tired of looking at it. James Newton Howard’s score is doing serious work, and the production had no disasters. It came in on budget with no on-set fiascos. That separates it from Waterworld and undercuts the usual story about it. The running time is a hundred and seventy-seven minutes and it doesn’t have three hours of story. The middle hour repeats itself, several towns blur together, and a subplot about a pregnancy occupies far more space than its consequences justify.
Cut to two hours with the novel’s irony restored, this is a good film. That version was available. Warner Bros. had given a star free rein after Dances with Wolves, and free rein is what produced the length.
It also arrived at the wrong moment for its sincerity. December 1997 belonged to Titanic, and audiences had one three hour earnest epic to give their money to that season. This one opened on Christmas Day into that, with a trailer people had reportedly been laughing at for months.
The Razzies Were a Pile-On
It took every award it was nominated for, five in total, including Worst Picture, Worst Actor, Worst Director and Worst Screenplay. It was reportedly the first film ever to sweep every category it was up for. Eighty million dollars in production against somewhere between twenty and thirty million worldwide, released on Christmas Day 1997, with an eight percent critical score.
The reception had started before anybody saw it. Audiences were reportedly laughing at the trailer months ahead of release, Waterworld two years earlier had made Costner a punchline, and the reviews arrived into a story that was already written.
That’s worth separating from the film. A picture with a strong premise, real beauty, a good villain and a fatal tonal error isn’t the worst film of its year, and the sweep tells you more about how a reputation forms than about what is on screen. I think the sweep was lazy and mean. The joke about Waterworld was already written, and a film with this much going for it deserved a fairer hearing than a punchline that had been circulating since the trailer.
The revaluation has been slow and it’s happening. People who come to it now, with no memory of 1997 and no investment in the joke, tend to report a long, flawed, oddly moving film about mail. That’s roughly the correct verdict, and it took the better part of twenty-five years before anybody outside a small minority was permitted to reach it out loud without an argument.
A reputation that forms before release is almost impossible to move afterward, because the reviews get written into a narrative that already exists.
The practical version for a writer: the framing around your work does more than the work does at launch. Cover, blurb, comparison titles and the first review set the terms everybody else argues inside.
And be careful about the previous project. Costner was being reviewed for Waterworld in every notice. That’s a cost of a public failure that nobody warns you about.
Should you watch The Postman?
Watch the first hour. That contains a good film about how institutions get rebuilt out of a lie, and I like it enough that everything after it feels like a letdown.
The 5 is that hour and the photography propping up two more hours of a movie agreeing with itself, all the way to a bronze statue of the man who directed it. Cut to two hours with Brin’s irony left in, I’d be rating it well above the middle.
