The Bite of Life
This morning I got directed to and read in its entirety a story from GQ about Kevin Costner. I can’t say I remember ever having read a GQ article before, but I quite enjoyed it. Mostly I enjoyed it because the topic of Kevin Costner has always been of interest to me from his earliest days in film. Just the other day I rewatched from start to finish, The Big Chill, which I’ve always loved both as a movie and a soundtrack with all its Credence Clearwater Revival glory. I imagine some of you know that The Big Chill was Kevin Costner’s first big movie. You may pause and think through the cast with Kline, Close, Berenguer, Goldblum, Hurt and Tilly and come up with a blank. But if you go to the end of the cast list, you will see his name as the actor playing Alex, the dead guy who gives rise to the Big Chill weekend. In fact, the only thing you really see of Costner are his stitched up wrists and the combing of his front locks by the undertaker. All of the scenes where he was alive were cut from the movie. Not exactly an auspicious start to a big acting career.
But not long after that, Costner was cast in major roles in Silverado, American Flyers (a favorite bicycling movie of mine) and Untouchables. Then came his starring role in Bull Durham, the classic baseball movie, which properly launched his acting career in a more notable direction. His next role may be the one he is best known for in Field of Dreams, where he again used his high school baseball playing skills to make his role more credible. The first thing I like about Kevin Costner is that rather than spending his time doing Bull Durham 2, 3 and 4, which the strong showing of the original was likely on offer to him, he chose instead to go his own way and produce, direct and act in his own production, a production everyone in Hollywood thought he was crazy to undertake. What came out of that was his proudest moment when Dances With Wolves ended up winning multiple Oscars including specifically for Costner for Best Actor and Best Director.
From that point onward, Costner was always a controversial actor in Hollywood, known as an iconoclast who always needed to go his own way rather than take the easy and predictable path to the next paycheck. He was always a guy with strong opinions about what he wanted to say in his movies. People who work with him say he is intense and professional, but also very demanding, no less of himself than anyone else. Some of my favorite movies are Kevin Costner productions. These are the movies that I will almost always watch when they catch my eye, no matter how many times I have already seen them. To me, that is the true mark of an actor or film that wins my admiration. In the case of Kevin Costner, it is both actor and film since he so often takes the lead in producing his own chosen work. There is JFK, The Bodyguard (which made me fall in love with Whitney’s voice), Waterworld, Tin Cup (the quintessential golf movie for someone who can only take golf so seriously), and one of my all-time favorites, The Postman.
The Postman captures more of the things I like in a movie than most. It is about a post-apocalyptic, dystopian world where one man stumbles upon a way to distinguish himself and yet to retain his staunch individualism in a world that prefers to focus on survival rather than greatness. I like an underdog story where the protagonist prevails over the inglorious system and does so in a way that motivates others to rise above their mundane existence. Sometimes its the small things that make a movie so special. In this case, the scene where the marauding troops prefer to watch The Sound of Music night after night rather than more manly movie choices acts as subtle reminder of the humanity that Costner sees in the larger-than-life run of the world that surrounds greatness.
There are several themes that tend to inhabit the movies that Costner tends to choose and/or make. Sports keeps coming back into the picture with follow-on movies like For Love of the Game, Draft Day and McFarland, USA. Politics seems never far from his mind either with the likes of Thirteen Days and Swing Vote. And while heroic roles like The Guardian and Hidden Figures, he is not above taking more complex and less perfect roles like in A Perfect World, The War, Mr. Brooks and The Criminal. But, like Robert Redford and other actors before him, Kevin Costner seems most at home in the western genre, perhaps because of his Oscar-winning role as Lieutenant Dunbar. His role in Open Range (co-starring the great Robert Duvall) seems very in-keeping with the Kevin Costner we all know, as does his Texas Ranger role in The Highwayman (again with a great co-star in Woody Harrelson). He then went on to make most of five seasons of Yellowstone, which got much of the nation through its bout of COVID, only to end in controversy as to whether he was being unreasonable with the studio in finishing season five or if they had somehow failed to meet the exacting standards Costner tends to set for script and production of his work.
The cause of the rift in the end (which may still get patched up in the future since Costner does like to finish what he starts and he does relate strongly to the Joh Dutton patriarchal character), was the making of Costner’s long-term project for a four-part movie series called Horizon, which chronicles the making of the West. Like all things Costner, Horizon is braking convention by launching its first tow movies almost back-to-back this June and August, breaking with all the cautious conventions of Hollywood. In fact, Costner is even more breaking with conservative convention by sinking a goodly portion of his wealth into the films. Who knows if this will be Costner’s last hurrah. He is my age (one year younger), so I feel like I know how he probably feels about where he is in his life. He is neither ready to hang up his spurs, nor is he unaware that he has fewer days ahead than behind him.
There is a great deal of dialogue with Costner in this GQ article, but the comment that I like most that explains his life. Philosophy so well to me is when he says that he has taken a big bite out of life and that at times life has taken a big bite out of him. To me that is a righteous symbol and perhaps even a standard for greatness, the willingness to understand that nothing comes without risk and cost and that it should still not deter you from grabbing for whatever brass ring seems worthwhile to you. In Kevin Costner’s case he talks about his overreach for the next great movie as something that will inure to the benefit of his retirement and his heirs. What he should add to that and perhaps he is too self-effacing to say this, is that it also inures to the benefit of his fans like me. I like seeing someone take a bite out of life and I understand that life does, indeed, tend to bite back more often than not. One of my favorite expression is that some days you eat the bear and some days the bear eats you. Nothing could seem more natural to me and I remain a dedicated fan of Kevin Costner and will anxiously await this summer’s two installments of Horizon.