THE POSTMAN MOVIE

Performing Shakespeare in exchange for thin gruel whenever he drifts into a town, he’s abducted and pressed into the Holnist army, a pack of white supremacists led by General Bethlehem (Will Patton). Costner’s chief weakness during these times is that even when he’s trying to play a cranky loner, he still seems avuncular. Set in the distant future of 2013, Costner plays an unnamed drifter wending his way through the pristine Pacific Northwest of a fallen United States, with only his loyal mule Bill to accompany him. Evidently it has not been forgotten: people have been joking about it on Twitter ever since word began to get out that now, in 2020, the postal service is under threat.

THE POSTMAN MOVIE

It is a considerably better movie than it got credit for back in 1997, when it was savaged by critics and flopped in theaters. Characters with names like “General Bethlehem” and “Ford Lincoln Mercury” stare each other down in this thing, and it’s all totally in earnest. And yet, its one-note characters are distinctive, its silly lines are delivered with conviction, and its racist/nationalist/survivalist bad guys don’t get to hide behind implication and innuendo as we are shown why they are evil sacks of shit. This is baffling to me because its main sin is that it’s far too long ( three hours?!) and too boring-the scenario just doesn’t call for such an epic runtime. I watched The Postman once when it came out 23 years ago and have never laid eyes on it since, and yet in the intervening years I seem to have remembered almost all of what’s notable about it.

The postman