TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/062689/06268900.071

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SHOW BUSINESS, Page  76

Pursuing The Dream

Sexy, straight-on and ambitious, Kevin Costner

is a grownup hero with brains

     By  RICHARD CORLISS

    The movie hero's ten commandments:  1. A man stands alone.
2. A man stands by his friends.  3. A man protects his family.
4. A man loves doing his work well.  5. A man is at home out of
doors.  6. A man shares and plays fair.  7. A man speaks his mind.
8. A man hoards his smiles.  9. A man follows his dreams. 10. What
he's got is what he is.

    Kevin Costner is the man of the moment and a star out of his
time. What other actor would think to achieve rampant movie fame
by playing a Soviet spy and two baseball fanatics? For Costner,
though, the improbable risk was a good career move. As Eliot Ness
in The Untouchables, he played the straightest arrow in
Prohibition-era Chicago and made saintliness sexy. As Tom Farrell,
the cryptic intelligence officer in 1987's No Way Out, he brought
devious modernity to a character right out of a '40s suspense
novel. As Crash Davis, the bush-league catcher in 1988's Bull
Durham, he found charm in cynicism and anchored the first hit
baseball movie in a dozen years. And as Ray Kinsella in the current
Field of Dreams -- the Iowa farmer who hears spectral pleas of
pain, builds a ball park in his cornfield and follows the voices
back to his childhood heart -- Costner, 34, has touched filmgoers
with an E.T. for adults.

    Both Bull Durham and Field of Dreams echo with the American and
Hollywood past. They blend hip showmanship and a vigorous
Saturday-matinee innocence. But they work for an audience because
Kevin Costner is in them. Virtually unknown three years ago, he is
one of the few actors people will consistently line up to see. Men
like him, women love him; when he walks into a room or a movie, the
wistful lust of female fans sticks to him like decals. His name
above the title guarantees quality; each of his hit movies is
honorable and ambitious. And each gains a magnificent credibility
from his presence. No matter how predictable or implausible the
plots, his rugged face doesn't lie. You simply have to believe
Kevin Costner.

    "Kevin can do it all," says Casey Silver, president of
worldwide production for the MCA Motion Picture Group. "He can
carry a gun or a woman in his arms. He can be tough or add a sweet
comedic touch." The surprise is that an actor so versatile can be
so focused. Ask Phil Alden Robinson, the writer-director of Field
of Dreams. "You can't force him to do something that's false," says
Robinson. "He marches to his own Walkman." Or maybe to his own
Victrola. For Costner is both a harbinger of the postimperial
American male and a throwback to heroes of Hollywood's grandest
days.

    Today, when movies are not so grand, male icons come in two
models. The comics (Bill Murray, Tom Hanks, Eddie Murphy) trade in
hip facetiousness, in sitcom-size emotions, in the suave hustling
of attitude. The hunks (Harrison Ford, Sylvester Stallone, Clint
Eastwood) go crusading for the Grail, the heavyweight title, the
urban psycho, but have few communal roots; they are loners, in
quest only of the quest. Suspended between these two types is young
Tom Cruise -- a certified star in search of an enduring identity.

    Costner is something else: a grownup hero with brains. He's
modern and classic. He thinks fast and shoots straight. He has city
reflexes that help him beat the big boys at hardball. Yet he stokes
memories of the lone man on a horse, silhouetted against the craggy
horizon and setting sun of Old West values. He has the requisite
danger for big-screen stardom -- the stubbornness in pursuit of
ideals, the slow anger when pushed, the threat in a face that can
mask its intentions -- even as his actions inspire trust. He could
be a husband, a lover, a chief of state. And now Costner is poised
to tote the ten commandments of frontier heroism into an anxious
new decade. He is the hard-riding scout bearing the movies' message
of what America thinks it was and hopes it can be again.

    Of course, that's just casting. And acting. As well as any
performer, Costner knows that his eminence is a happy fortuity of
timing and talent. And he doesn't mind being this year's hot
ticket. The $5 million salary he could command for each picture is
a perk. Nor has Costner complained about making movie love to Susan
Sarandon in a bathtub (Bull Durham) or Sean Young in the No Way Out
limo -- the window-steaming sex scene that earned Costner his first
priapic appeal. And for an outdoorsman who was a fine athlete in
school, there can be few tangier pleasures than playing baseball
in Bull Durham and Field of Dreams or playing a cowboy in
Silverado. Even in the Nitti-gritty Untouchables, where he earned
his first star billing as Eliot Ness, Costner got to lead a posse
to a varmint's hideout.

    Now he is wielding his clout and testing his fans'
expectations. In his next movie, Revenge, he plays an unlikable
cuckoldder. Last week he began scouting locations for Dances with
Wolves, a drama about the Sioux nation, in which he will star and
make his debut as a director. Still, it makes him itch that his
recent roles have earned him a Hunk-of-the-Month label. "I have the
same problem with stardom that I have with royalty," he says.
"They're judged not by the quality of their ideas but by their
birthright. I didn't set out to be a star. If you do, you engage
in manipulation. You do stuff to be liked. I didn't want to be
endorsed; I wanted to be listened to. I had ideas about things."

    To be a new star in Hollywood is to be pegged as the
reincarnation of some old star, and Costner watchers have their
candidates. "Kevin fulfills many of the same ideals that a Jimmy
Stewart or a Gary Cooper did for their generation: the little guy
against the system, the pure guy vs. evil, the strong man in a time
of trouble," says Tom Pollock, chairman of the MCA Motion Picture
Group. "It's hard to think of any other leading man in his 30s who
can play this variety of roles -- action hero, romantic lead and
family man."

    James Earl Jones, who co-stars in Field of Dreams, was at first
skeptical of Cooping up Costner. "But watching Kevin on the monitor
on location," he says, "I had to admit: it was Gary Cooper. For one
thing, Gary Cooper was always looking to spit. He and Kevin have
the same pucker in the mouth." For his part, Costner wouldn't mind
going back in time to get back in the saddle. "I'd have loved to
spend five or six years in the studio system," he says, "doing all
those cowboy pictures. I was born 30 years too late for the kind
of cinema I'd like to do."

    Here he is plastering rouge on the Old Hollywood corpse. In the
heyday of the studio system, few stars were given the chance of
controlling their cinematic fate. Lawrence Kasdan, who directed
Costner in The Big Chill (where his substantial role was cut to a
few cameo shots as a corpse) and Silverado, compares the actor with
Steve McQueen. "Like McQueen," Kasdan notes, "Kevin has a real
sense of what he can do. He has always known what's really
important for him, rather than what others think is important."

    Costner knows his strengths and limitations. "I can't fix my
car," he says, "though I play characters who can. I can't work my
computer. I don't understand certain financial things, though I'm
really good with the bottom line. I flunked geometry twice. My mind
just doesn't work like that. But I'm completely comfortable in this
medium. I put in hard days, but I love every bit of it." He's also
sensitive about what he considers his own physical limitations. "I
don't think of myself as classically handsome. I've been told that
the camera is really good to me, but sometimes when people meet me,
they're baffled. That's why I hate to be photographed out of
character."

    Costner knew how to project and protect himself -- knew acutely
who Kevin Costner was -- long before anyone in Hollywood cared. "He
had total self-confidence from the beginning," says J.J. Harris,
his agent from 1984 until this year. "I'm sure he's had it forever.
He's a bigger-than-life person whose presence fills a room, though
not in an ostentatious way." Yet he was often willing to torpedo
his career to make a point. In Frances, one of his first movies,
he risked not getting a Screen Actors Guild card when he balked at
saying what he deemed an inappropriate line of dialogue. When
Oliver Stone asked if he wanted to play the Tom Berenger role in
Platoon, "I didn't even meet with him," Costner says, "because my
brother Dan had been in Viet Nam, and I was reluctant to do a film
about something that had such impact on his life. In a way, I
regret not doing it; it was a wonderful film. But my consciousness
was with my brother."

    Family is important to Costner. Dan, 38, who received a Navy
and Marine Corps medal for heroism in Viet Nam, is in charge of
finances at Kevin's company, Tig Productions, named after their
grandmother. To take the job, he left a corporate vice presidency.
"You wouldn't do this unless it was your brother," Dan says evenly.
"And you wouldn't do it unless your brother was Kevin."

    Kevin's wife Cindy, his college sweetheart, left a good job at
Delta Air Lines when the Costners began a family, which now
includes Annie, 5, Lily, 2 1/2, and Joe, 1 1/2. "She's active,
she's involved," Dan says of Cindy. "She doesn't want to be a
Hollywood wife." The couple seem close, considering that one of
them is a screen stud with a gypsy work schedule. In April, Costner
took his wife, children and parents to the gala opening of the
Disney/MGM Studios Theme Park.

    "Finding a balance between personal and professional is an
ongoing struggle for Kevin," Harris says. "He's a movie star now,
and the demands on him are staggering." Costner is aware of the
challenge. "I know I can do better with relationships with my
family, and I have to figure out how," he confesses. "There's just
not enough time for the people I care about. I'm a good dad -- when
I'm at home. But when I'm away, my motel-room walls aren't lined
with pictures of my family. Maybe something is wrong with me, but
I separate things in order to keep exploring who I am. It's a
high-class set of problems that cut into my creativity and my
family life. I don't want to stop what I'm doing, and I don't want
to lose what I have."

    The Costner clan has always been on the move. "This is a Grapes
of Wrath family," explains brother Dan. The Costners, of Irish and
German descent (with a hint of Cherokee blood), moved West when
they lost their Oklahoma farm. Kevin's father Bill recapitulated
the Okie migration, moving from one Southern California town to
another in various jobs for Southern California Edison. "From Day
1, Kevin was his own person," recalls Bill, 60. "Once he decided
to take charge of organizing a parade at his school. I figured it
was too big a job for an eleven-year-old and said, `Kevin, you
can't do that.' And Kevin said, `Dad, never tell me I'm not able
to do something.' He went ahead and organized the parade."

    From early days, Kevin loved most of the things he learned to
use later: family, sports, conflict, movies. The young jock wrote
stories -- he tried to compile a book based on letters and tapes
Dan sent back from Viet Nam -- and went to the movies. "Great
heroism, great love stories sent chills down my spine," he recalls.
"I was particularly intrigued by `dilemmas.' To me, drama is
dilemma -- the fight not to do something. A dilemma is wanting to
kiss a woman and not doing it. Once you do it, it's `action.'
Action is fine. I understand what it's about. But you have to
understand where it comes from." And you can guess where the
kissing dilemma came from. Kevin, only 5 ft. 2 in. as a high school
sophomore, was shy about meeting girls; he claims he never dated.

    By the time he entered California State University at
Fullerton, Kevin had grown into an athlete's tall, poised body. "I
think I like sports because of my father," Costner says. "He never
insisted I play with him, which made it even more attractive. He's
my ideal of how a father should direct his son." Clearly, Kevin's
ball park was a field of dreams with few anguished undertones.
"Sports, besides the obvious competitive aspect, is about sharing
and being fair," he notes. "And I've always liked to roll in the
dirt. When I was little, I wasn't `it' very often in tag. You can
translate that into acting. I don't get caught lying very often.
I make sure that difficult scenes come off."

    The Costners were no kind of show-biz family. "I always figured
that people on the screen were intended to be there" Costner says.
"Acting was something other people did." Then, in the middle of a
boring accounting class for his business major in college, he saw
an ad for a production of Rumpelstiltskin. "The moment I decided
to be an actor, I never looked back. I never breathed an easier
breath. I relaxed. Then all I had to do was learn."

    It would be a tortuous road to prominence, potholed with the
usual odd jobs and rejections -- and films he rejected. He
auditioned three times for the role Nicolas Cage snagged in Raising
Arizona; he said no to the Jeff Bridges part in Jagged Edge and the
Mel Gibson role in Mrs. Soffel. But Costner knew he was destined
to do the work he loves doing well. "The doubt of success crept in
-- I was the kid in the backseat asking, `When are we going to get
there?' -- but I never questioned being on the right road. That's
the fun part. If you're obsessed with your destination, you miss
80% of the point of acting: the ride there, the people you meet
along the way. Mind you, I'm still not `there,' because I've never
been sure what I was after. I'm the rat going forward on the
treadmill. From the outside, it might look like I'm going in
circles, but I feel I'm going like hell."

    By 1987 his career was going full blaze too. In The
Untouchables and No Way Out, both released that summer, Costner was
the young man on the move, trying to show his elders that he was
as smart as he looked. In the first film, he was as pure as Galahad
and got shouldered off the screen by Robert De Niro and Sean
Connery; in the second, he was as devious as Kim Philby and held
his own. But in both, he suggested a steely, all-American ambition
that synced smartly with the mid-'80s American work ethic: get it
done, whatever the cost. And there is a cost. To beat Al Capone,
Ness must match the gangster's brutal efficiency. In No Way Out,
his character is brilliantly compromised: good guy, bad guy; our
spy, their spy. It is a film about acting on the global scale,
about convincing the world that you are what you are not.

    In Bull Durham, Costner is a catcher trying to stave off
retirement while he snarls baseball wisdom into the ear of an
A-ball phenom. In this fable about the triumph of star quality over
talent, the nice thing is that the movie is on the side of the
losers; the funny thing is that Costner's Crash Davis, in baseball
terms, is the loser, but he wears his grievances stylishly. And for
all its locker-room ribaldry, Bull Durham was Costner's kind of
movie. "The common thread in each of my films is poignance," he
says, " `narrative' in a movie world that thinks audiences won't
sit still for it. All the camerawork in the world can't disguise
that there's no story. The cards of narrative have to keep
flopping. There must be tremendously careful construction and
attention to detail. My movies can't be salvaged by a car chase."

    Enter director Robinson with Field of Dreams, a movie with
plenty of narrative and poignance, about baseball as the tree house
of the American male. "To grow up male in this country," Robinson
says, "is to have a special place in your heart for playing catch
with Dad. It's a longing for a more innocent time, for easy
connections that grew complicated with the years. We live in
cynical times. We're all jaded. A lot of our heroes have turned out
to have clay feet. I don't believe in astrology, crystals,
reincarnation, heaven, hell. I don't believe dreams come true. But
it's a primal emotion to want to make the bad good -- to hope
things will work out in the end."

    In Robinson's adaptation of the W.P. Kinsella novel Shoeless
Joe, Ray is a New York boy, reared by a father he loved, resented
and finally escaped from, who has brought his wife (Amy Madigan)
and daughter to an Iowa farm. One night a voice whispers, "If you
build it, he will come." Inexplicably moved, he builds a baseball
diamond on the farm, where his father's old baseball idol,
"Shoeless" Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta), soon materializes. Another
message -- "Ease his pain" -- propels Ray to Boston to corral a
reclusive novelist, Terence Mann (James Earl Jones), and a third
mystic entreaty -- "Go the distance" -- sends them to Minnesota for
an encounter with the ghost of another major leaguer, "Moonlight"
Graham (Burt Lancaster). And, finally, for a trip back to his fungo
Fatima and a game of catch with the one man he has been dreading
and dying to meet.

    "Any class in film writing," says Charles Gordon, who produced
Field of Dreams with his brother Lawrence, "would teach that this
story contained the three elements you should never make movies
about: fantasy, baseball and farming." Most studios turned it down
flat. But film executive Pollock, according to Robinson, "said he'd
make it even with an unknown. `This is the kind of movie you make
only if a voice tells you to,' he told me. And I said, `If you make
it, they will come.' " But could Robinson make it? "It was a 64-day
shoot," Robinson says, "and 64 times I said I'd never direct again.
I had industrial-strength angst." Often, though, the film seemed
blessed. The scene where fog rolls in over Shoeless Joe was no
special effect but the only five minutes that summer that fog
touched the ball field. Says Chuck Gordon: "It was magic from Day
1."

    Field of Dreams is a movie to make a grown man cry. "Arnold
Schwarzenegger called to tell us that he couldn't stop crying,"
says Lawrence Gordon. "Ron Darling, who pitches for the Mets, told
me it was the only time he had cried in a film. He said he was so
inspired, he went out and pitched a shutout."

    Some men, with dryer eyes, have other ideas. Iowa Governor
Terry Branstad hopes Universal will allow him to use the line "Is
this heaven? No, it's Iowa!" in a tourism campaign to plug his
state. Others are enjoying a kind of agricultural celebrity. "I
built it, and they're still coming," says Don Lansing, whose farm,
just outside Dyersville, includes part of the playing field.
"Hundreds of people, from all over." His neighbor Al Ameskamp, who
decided to plow his part of the baseball diamond to grow corn again
this year, says, "The only voices that I've been hearing out there
are saying, `Al, it's dry.' "

    There are a few dry eyes as well. Some viewers find the film
smug in its visionary fervor. And baseball mavens find it odd that
Joe Jackson and his infamous Chicago Black Sox, bribed by gamblers
to help throw the 1919 World Series and the 1920 pennant race,
should be lauded for their innocence -- as if, years from now, some
movie should dream of bringing Ben Johnson back to sprint for that
elusive Olympic medal. Bill James, the baseball writer and sultan
of sabermetrics, says Field of Dreams is "about people who love
baseball but leave Fenway Park in the fourth inning. Why does
Jackson bat right and throw left, instead of the other way around?
And where is his famous black bat? But Costner is great, and I'm
happy we have the movie."

    Love the movie and damn all those who don't as soulless swine.
Hate it and call it Field of Corn. But appreciate the care and
assurance with which it was made. And grant this, that in a time
when movies and politicians win approval by dodging the big awful
issues, Field of Dreams engineers a head-on collision with things
that matter: the desperate competition between fathers and sons,
the need for '60s idealism in the me-first '80s, the desire for
reconciliation beyond the grave. In a dialogue between Mann and Ray
as they approach the ball park, Field of Dreams provides its own
pan and rave. "Unbelievable!" exclaims Mann, and Ray replies, "It's
more than that. It's perfect."

    Costner defers credit for the film's success to Robinson: "He's
the star of Field of Dreams." But there are moments the star is
proud to claim. "When Ray is throwing to Shoeless Joe, he gets so
excited that he glances back to the house to see if his wife is
looking. When Ray is walking toward his dad, picking at his hand,
and, realizing that his dad is doing the same thing, he quickly
puts his hands down. And his run to the mound isn't a completely
athletic run. It's a little funny. There's some English on it.
Those things are mine and nobody else's."

    In Bull Durham, Crash says, more or less, "Never mess with a
winning streak." Costner is too restless to take that advice. If
moviegoers are embracing him only as a sanctified jock, maybe they
should brace themselves for Revenge, scheduled for release early
next year. This violent drama may upend -- or just end -- Costner's
current image as a Goody Two-Cleats. "Revenge is shocking, vulgar,
a bit of a fall from grace," Costner says. "But I have no problem
playing a man who isn't likable, as long as I understand him.
Revenge is strong medicine; you won't come out feeling good. That's
O.K. too. You don't have to have a snow cone at the end of every
movie. Right now, I don't know how this one will do. I don't make
broad claims on the playground, and I don't do it with movies.
That's beyond my control. I just go in believing in the story."

    Now he is believing in Dances with Wolves. "You know how
Americans setting foot in another country sometimes feel totally
at home?" he asks. "Well, for me, a country road has always felt
really right. The notion of a man on a horse, carrying all his
possessions on his back, totally self-sufficient, is really
romantic to me. When I was 18," the actor boasts, "I split L.A. and
built a canoe, which I paddled down the rivers that Lewis and Clark
navigated while they were making their way to the Pacific. So it's
not surprising to me that I'm making a movie on this theme: about
America and Americans. Directing isn't an exercise in control, not
a growing-up or a breaking-out phase. Of course I'm anxious. I'm
not sure I'll do a good job. It's not that I'm worried about the
people around me. I just want to make sure that my camera tells the
story."

    The safe bet is that no matter how suicidal his selection of
projects may seem on paper, Hollywood will go on believing in
Costner. "Everyone respects power in this business," says James
Earl Jones, "and Kevin's is a unique brand of power. It's not
predictable. He's not after megamillions or making sure his ego is
fulfilled. He isn't macho; he's pure male. If you press the wrong
buttons, the man is dangerous. He won't explode -- that's
counterproductive -- but he will set you straight real fast. He's
got away with things that a lot of up-and-comers couldn't have."
And how long will the system let Costner get away with it? "Hard
to say," Jones says. "It has to figure him out first."

    With Costner, that shouldn't be hard. "If you say what you mean
in this town," he once noted, "you're an outlaw." Now he's the
sheriff but still living proof of director Kasdan's law: "You know
you're on the right track if Hollywood finds you an enigma." And
Costner is pleased to fold that aura into his current radiance.
"People look at me and think they see everything," he says. "But
what they see is one moment frozen in time. I've come from
somewhere to get to that point. There's stuff in my back pockets,
up my sleeve that they don't know anything about. I don't offer up
everything there is, onscreen or in life. It's not guile. But
conversation is supposed to be a two-way thing, and generally
people want to know more about me than they want to reveal about
themselves. So of course I hold back. I'm not dying to tell people
my story."

    In some ways, he has already told it, in cinema code. The
adventure hero, the family man, the tenacious idealist are aspects
of Costner -- sportsman, husband and father, daredevil careerist
-- enlarged and illuminated on the big screen. Unlike the
sabermetrician or the grouchy critic, moviegoers do not sit in the
dark and gaze at the light in search of documentary; they want
mundane facts transformed into pulp poetry. They may not be looking
for a fax of an old-time movie hero either. No Kevin Cooper, thank
you. Kevin Costner suits them fine. They hope to follow the fellow
who follows the dream. And they will be curious to see if he
follows Field of Dreams as scrupulously as he has observed the
commandments of movie heroism. Now he has the power to create his
own dreams.