Ealasaid A. Haas
Opinion Writing
3/1/01As a filmgoer who reads movie reviews regularly, I have a question.
What did Kevin Costner do to the film critics in this country?
I’m not really a Costner fan, but until a couple years ago, I was in the minority. Back when "The Untouchables" and "Field of Dreams" were what Costner was known for, he was practically a critic darling. People were calling him ‘Hollywood’s new leading man!’ and singing his praises.
Now, it seems like he can’t do anything right. Not every critic has jumped on the Anti-Costner Bandwagon, but a great many have.
And they’re not even criticizing his performances, they’re criticizing him. Reviews of "3000 Miles to Graceland," Costner’s newest vehicle, are calling the film things like "an overstuffed, underfed numbskull" (The San Francisco Chronicle) and Costner "narcissistic" (The Mercury News). Even Roger Ebert, usually one of the fairer critics when it comes to Costner, calls it "a movie without an ounce of human kindness."
Whatever it is he did, he seems to have done it just after finishing "Dances With Wolves" which, like his films up until then, was received pretty well. In the eleven years since, having Costner as a star in a film has been a veritable kiss of death as far as the reviews go. He’s released twenty-odd films since "Dances," and only a handful have been graced with more than one or two solitary positive reviews.
Some have been demolished almost systematically.
"Waterworld" was the victim of a campaign which began before it was even released, and with such incredibly bad publicity from the word "go" it’s no wonder it didn’t do well. When you’ve been reading for months and months that a film is too long and too expensive and generally crummy, you aren’t exactly predisposed to like it. I sometimes think my mother and I (neither of us particularly fans of Costner) are the only two people in the Bay Area who actually liked the film.
Not to say that all of Costner’s films have been great. I’ve seen a grand total of seven of his movies, and I thought they were okay (although "Dances With Wolves" bored me) – not bad, but not perfect either. I was highly entertained by "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves," mostly because I could mock Costner’s non-accent and enjoy Alan Rickman. Ditto "3000 Miles to Graceland," which I not only enjoyed but have been recommending to my more intelligent friends, flaws and all.
He may not be a genius, but Kevin Costner is not a crummy actor, nor is he a particularly evil person, as near as I can tell. So why are critics treating him like he is?
Perhaps it’s a sort of pack mentality – a couple of critics just don’t happen to like Costner, and the rest follow. Now, not liking Costner is not, in itself a problem. Personally, I can’t stand Tom Hanks -there’s just something about him that grates me. But I don’t think he’s a bad person, or even a bad actor.
And I don’t trash him in a national newspaper.
Is it because Costner stopped making charming little sports movies like "Bull Durham" and "Field of Dreams" and turned to epics? That’s a matter of personal taste, which shouldn’t enter all that heavily into film criticism. Film criticism should be about the quality of a film, not just whether it was the kind of film the reviewer happens to enjoy.
Whatever the reason, this constant trashing of Costner and his work is growing tiresome. I’ve long since learned that his presence in a film pretty much guarantees that the reviews will be bad, regardless of the quality of the movie itself – and that’s one more reason not to trust film critics.
And moviegoers should be able to trust film critics. They’re our guides when choosing films, they’re supposed to help us look beneath the surface of the story and see deeper connections – they’re not supposed to be irrationally biased.
The bias against Kevin Costner present in so many hundreds of reviews may well be perfectly rational, but film critics haven’t explained it. And until they do, the reviews will serve me more as a source of entertainment than as a resource.