Kevin Costner deserves my sincerest congratulations: for over three decades now he has been boring me, irritating me and pissing me off. For the first 10 years of his career, I used to joke that his finest performance was as the corpse in Lawrence Kasdan’s odious boomer nostalgia-orgy The Big Chill. Then he won the best director Oscar for Dances With Wolves over Scorsese and Goodfellas and my enmity quadrupled, especially since those same acclaimed helming skills later gave us The Postman.
But now, as he unleashes what by my count is his sixth identikit sports movie, Disney’s crowd-pleasing McFarland, USA, he seems like a part of the climate that you never really notice any more, something annoying that you long ago tuned out. Like Noah Cross’s “politicians, whores and ugly buildings” – and Costner has arguably been all three in his time – he finally seems almost respectable these days, having outlived his callow early reputation. He gets cast a lot these days for the supposed depth of his screen persona, which only means he’s been around for ever: he’s been Superman’s earthly dad in Man Of Steel, Chris Pine’s boss in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, and he’s made his first venture into the post-Taken, geriatric-dad action genre in 3 Days To Kill.
In retrospect, many of his career choices led him here. He staked his claim to that most American and (in its popular format, such as it is these 30 years past) most moribund and backward-looking of genres, the western, to which he has returned often in the years since Kasdan’s Silverado in 1985, including as director-star in the rather good Open Range. I give him points for that commitment, even if he never quite rouses the spirit of Gary Cooper, another limited actor.
Then there are those sports movies, another fairly conservative genre that inflates the rules of any game into a worthy code to live by. It tells us that you can raise a boy up right (it’s almost always boys) with a baseball bat or a football helmet, some discipline, teamwork and that mysterious quality called sticktoitiveness. Although Costner is a Democrat (mostly), these are often mistakenly seen as middle-of-the-road, midwestern Republican values, and therein lies something of his appeal, and the reason why I never quite got Costner.
It’s because the baseball-western paradigm plays best in the middle America that people like me never encounter, among decent, square, small-C conservative people who think Tim Allen is funny – a huge, equally undemonstrative demographic, too often scorned. The problem is that Costner has always been angling to fill that Gary Cooper-shaped hole that for four decades now has been occupied by Harrison Ford. And Ford, I’ll wager, will be impossible to shift.
