Kevin Costner: All That Kevin Allows

Not everyone supported the canonization of Saint Kevin. Times reviewer lambasted Costner's spending "all that time alone on the screen, looking swell and acting noble, in a movie that runs three self-indulgent hours." If Hollywood has packaged Costner as the new American icon, Europeans have been slow to buy, perhaps because they are immune to the joys of baseball. Still, one would be hard-pressed to find a more forceful, more admired star in American movies today. "He can do anything he wants now," believes Wallis Nicita. "And it couldn't happen to a person with a more developed sense of personal honor and dignity."

In the face of Costner's golden boy image--he drives a 1968 Shelby Mustang, lives with his wife, daughters (ages six and four), two-year-old son, and a golden Labrador, not far from his parents' and brother's homes--national tabloids have moved in for the treatment. The Globe, for example, hinted at, but did not elaborate upon, "rumors of illicit affairs." Observes a long-time Costner associate, "Kevin is that rarity: a fundamentally principled human being. But he also has been hit with so much success, which has brought many women pursuing him, who wouldn't be turned around?" In 1988, the actor said of his marriage: "We aren't perfect. Some days are harder than others. Certainly, she's struggled with stuff that most women shouldn't have to put up with. Like being paired with some of the most beautiful women in the world, being made to appear that you are the quintessential couple and to have that regurgitated in front of you can't be easy. Simply, if the shoe was reversed, I don't think I could do it."

Now 36, Costner, who believes he has had "more exposure than anybody has a right to have," has apparently chosen to let his work do the talking. With China Moon, a Costner-produced gritty thriller starring Ed Harris and Madeleine Stowe tentatively scheduled for release late in the year, and his Robin Hood movie (directed by Kevin Reynolds of Fandango) out this month, he is at a crossroads. To those who insist that his future is in filmmaking, China Moon may prove or disprove his smarts for stirring together creative elements. Appropriately, considering Costner's sense of loyalty, its leading lady is Madeleine Stowe, with whom he survived Revenge; its director is John Bailey, the talented cinematographer of The Big Chill and Silverado, who was earlier let go as director of The Long Walk Home.

To those who see in Costner our best hope for an all-purpose leading man, his Robin Hood, a role as ripe for unintended giggles now as it was when Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn took it decades ago, may be an acid test. The omens are mixed. Kevin Reynolds reportedly went two weeks over schedule shooting on over 30 locations in England and France. A star of the film called Reynolds, who signed to direct the movie with less than six weeks' preparation time, "suicidally brave." Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Costner's Maid Marion, called the making of the massive movie "anarchy. The right hand never knew what the left hand was doing." And co-star Christian Slater, who has kind personal words for Reynolds, openly clashed with the director over his interpretation of the role of the rascally Will Scarlett.

Whatever fate befalls Robin Hood, Costner can whistle his own tune from here on in. After playing New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone's film about the Kennedy assassination, said to top Costner's agenda are The Bodyguard, an old Lawrence Kasdan script which he and Whitney Houston have rescued from development limbo since such actors as Diana Ross and Clint Eastwood failed to get it off the ground in the early '80s, and another period piece based on the life of Irish revolutionary Michael Collins. He has also been talked up for Random Hearts, from Warren Adler's novel about a romance between the spouses of two secret lovers killed in a plane wreck, a role Dustin Hoffman once coveted.

Costner has two roads to choose from, and his next moves will prove telling. He's Hollywood's man of the hour, in the position that co-stars Paul Newman and Robert Redford were with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Both parlayed that golden moment into directing careers, too, but each pursued his subsequent career differently. Newman just kept at his grind, a leading man making movies, hits and flops alike, with the good-natured assurance that in time, as he aged, his audience would age right alongside him. Redford, on the other hand, came to resemble Warren Beatty in his hyper-selectiveness (read: fear), only deigning to make an occasional film every few eons, and only then with a phalanx of technical assistance to try desperately to preserve the illusion of his youth. It should prove fascinating to watch what Kevin Costner does with the power he's accumulated.

__________

Stephen Rebello, the author of Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, wrote our March cover story on Robert Downey, Jr.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6