Back In the Saddle

By RICHARD CORLISS

I don't feel like a relic," Kevin Costner says over breakfast in a Manhattan hotel room. He doesn't look like one either. Fit and genial at 48, he moves or sits with the easy poise of all those athletes he's played: the hungry golfer in Tin Cup, the cyclist in American Flyers, the baseball veterans in Bull Durham (recently chosen by SPORTS ILLUSTRATED as the best-ever baseball movie) and For Love of the Game. His talk has a coiled energy as well. Sentences, packed with imagery and analogies, accrue momentum until he's created an aria, an oration on the fly. He has the assurance of someone who is used to being listened to, who's had more than a cup of coffee in the big leagues. For maybe a decade, Costner was the Greg Maddux of Hollywood stars, quietly outpitching the competition.

These days, though, it's almost as if the star is back in the minors. Costner's last film with robust earnings, 1995's Waterworld, was a chaotic venture ("Kevin's Gate," critics called it) and the most expensive movie ever made at the time. His last big western, The Postman, in 1997, was seen as a risible catastrophe by most critics (and by a few, like this one, as an ornery and stirring achievement). His last six films together earned less at the domestic box office than the Oscar-winning 1990 Dances with Wolves did on its own. He can't fall back on a franchise series (no sequels on his resume), and he isn't the type for a big knockabout comedy. Costner is at that poignant crux in a star's career when it's time to think about taking supporting roles, doing a TV cop show, trying Broadway, running for Governor.

But, dammit, no. "I still like the idea of movies," Costner says. So what does it feel like, not being Harry Hot anymore? "Well, your ego is hurt," he says, "and if you don't acknowledge that, you don't live in the real world. But I feel successful." And what does it mean that his films now gross pocket change? "It means that it's hard for a movie like Open Range to get made."

Open Range is that most unfashionable creature, a western--the story of two cowboys, Charley (Costner) and Boss (Robert Duvall) in 1882, caring for their herd and each other, wandering into town and into trouble. It is peopled with the usual suspects: the corrupt sheriff (James Russo), the mean rich guy (Michael Gambon), the warm, weathered spinster (Annette Bening). The plot is basically a real-estate wrangle: whether Boss and Charley have the right to graze their herd on land claimed by the rich guy. And there's a lovely interlude with Charley and the spinster, where the cowboy has to recall gentlemanly codes of conduct (picking up clods of earth that his boots have left on her foyer carpet) and learn again how to make his heart soft for her while keeping it hard for the inevitable shootout in town.

But what makes Open Range such a mature and satisfying treat is the interplay of Boss and Charley, two terse, honorable men in the saddle. It's a real and rare pleasure to see Costner and Duvall together--these masters of intense passivity, who know how to be watched when they're listening. They can do tough talk (Duvall to three interlopers: "One twitch, and you're in hell") or laconic wit (Costner as he spots a few other folks: "Country's fillin' up"). They make a terrific pair of knights errant, or maybe bachelor dinosaurs, enjoying themselves on the Western plain right before the asteroid hits.

Costner is a kind of dinosaur: a movie man out of his time, a guy making slow-fuse epics in an age when Hollywood product is ever more agitated, ever more fearful of the teenager's hand on the fast-forward or eject button. Doesn't he know that a top film these days needs a furious pulse? "There's a whole mentality of people who believe that's correct," Costner declares, "and they probably are correct. That's why those movies are making hundreds of millions of dollars. It's just that I have to hold on to myself."

There was a time when being himself was more than enough. He came out of nowhere (his most prominent role had been the corpse in The Big Chill) in the mid-'80s with four consecutive, highly respected hits: The Untouchables, No Way Out, Bull Durham and Field of Dreams. His presence--affable, earnest, expressing hopes, hiding wounds--became a guarantee of quality in Hollywood films.

Of course, what he really wanted to do was direct, so he did a three-hour western with half the dialogue in Sioux, and Dances won him Oscars for Picture and Director and earned $420 million worldwide. He roamed through genres, playing a surfer-accented Robin Hood, a bodyguard for Whitney Houston, JFK's Jim Garrison: three more improbable hits. Costner regularly made grownup films popular. He was Hanks before Hanks was Hanks, and with a sex appeal Tom couldn't match.

From the start Costner was one of the few grownup males in films. That's partly because he came late to celebrity. "People see stardom as a place," he says. "They don't see all the steps that it took to get there. Stardom didn't happen to me at 19 or 21--it happened to me at 30. So I wasn't that impressed with my success, wasn't dizzied by it. I wasn't all that eager to ride down Sunset Boulevard with my head out the window doing cocaine."

As an actor-auteur, Costner has an appeal akin to Clint Eastwood's--he might be Clint's suburban kid brother--and at least as much directorial skill. But he didn't latch on to the Eastwood quick-'n-cheap production model. He thinks in the epic (long and expensive) mode, and he loves the movie moments that others dismiss as downtime: the pauses between lines of dialogue, the glimpses of vast vistas. "Nothing in a movie should threaten to bore," he says. "But I think silences are dramatic. I think images are dramatic. And if there's a dramatic reality going on, I let it play."

Slow-moving westerns (he also starred in the three-hour Wyatt Earp) might seem the very model of a moviemaker's arrogance. Costner sees the epic length of his oaters as the highest form of cinematic etiquette. "In Hollywood you get leaned on to cut out parts of the subplot. 'They won't know it's gone.' But people know if you don't give them coffee and dessert after dinner. No one's going to bitch out loud, because certainly you've fed them. But have you taken care of them? Has the experience been as full as possible? People can tell when they have been given everything--they can just tell. And somehow, subconsciously, they appreciate that level of generosity."

The question now is whether people will show up for his dinner, when the menu is cows and grit and heaps o' sizzling Kevin. The star understands that he can't finance an $80 million movie that gets a $17 million return, as The Postman did. He made Open Range on the cheap: for $26 million, taking no salary, shooting in affordable Alberta and raising all but $10 million of the budget himself. Disney put up the rest. "People wanted to make this movie," he says of his sponsors at the Mouse House, "not for a lot of money, but they still wanted to make it."

Dick Cook, who runs Disney's movie units and whose kids went to the same school as Costner's, admits that the movie "was attractive because of the modest risk. But it was also a great project. It was my judgment that Kevin was at a place where he could make something of quality." And, as Cook notes, Open Range is the only studio film for adults out there now, after Seabiscuit.

Costner is no sprinter; he's a long-distance Thoroughbred. And he doesn't seem fretful about his rising or falling spot on the hot list. He is happily engaged to his longtime live-in, Christine Baumgartner, and content to have projects as actor (Mike Binder's The Upside of Anger) and director (a possible HBO version of the Pulitzer-prizewinning trilogy The Kentucky Cycle). Count on Costner to continue with a loner's, a cowpoke's stubbornness. He will make a relationship western about an older man and his young partner--and, dammit, he'll play the younger guy. (Duvall is 72.) He will keep on making movies for filmgoers who don't get antsy if something doesn't blow up or someone doesn't fart every two minutes, for people who appreciate films as landscape paintings and heroes as strong men dwarfed by that big sky.

That's because it's not the glory, or the box-office tally, that appeals to him. It's being, cinematically, in the saddle. "There's no reason I won't again make hit movies," Costner says. "But I can't identify that as who I am, or I'd be lost. My song hasn't changed. So if you want to attack me, you know the hill I'll be standing on every morning."

So ride on, cowboy. Just not into the sunset.