Kevin Costner

Watch what Kevin Costner does while someone else is talking. In Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 (2024) he sits on a horse and lets Abbey Lee carry the conversation, saying a sentence where most leading men would want the paragraph. In Bull Durham (1988) he lets Susan Sarandon's flirtation run on without reaching for the laugh at every pause. It is the same habit thirty-six years apart. His composure never looks like withholding, so when he does speak we assume he means it.

That composure made him the leading man of the late 1980s, and it took two baseball films to show what it was for. Ron Shelton's Bull Durham gave it a partner in Sarandon, and their scenes are easy in a way most screen flirtation is not. Phil Alden Robinson's Field of Dreams (1989) turned it inside out: Ray Kinsella is all unguarded eagerness, and Costner lets that eagerness look faintly embarrassing before the film asks us to believe in it. We were moved by that performance more than we expected, because he plays a grown man's faith in a ball game as something he knows is foolish and cannot give up. Dances with Wolves (1990), which he also directed, put the watchfulness at the centre of a film, and Dean Semler's wide plains gave him something worth watching. He never acts as though each discovery were a revelation, and the buffalo hunt shows how well he can organise action when he is behind the camera.

Where it fails is when the part wants pleasure rather than principle. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) gives him a hero who breaks the law for good reasons and he plays it as a duty, carrying the man's importance into scenes that need him to enjoy himself, while Alan Rickman runs off with the film. In The Untouchables (1987) he had the sense not to compete with Robert De Niro's Capone, and Sean Connery's impatience did the work of making Eliot Ness's goodness bearable. Oliver Stone's JFK (1991) suits him better: Jim Garrison has to seem worth listening to before the film can ask us to follow him anywhere, and Costner's restraint is the credential.

The director is a different question. Dances with Wolves ran 181 minutes and mostly earned them, though the narration kept explaining an interest his face had already made clear. The middle of his career took in Waterworld (1995) and The Postman (1997), which we have not reviewed and which were criticised for their length, and then a long stretch as John Dutton in Yellowstone (2018–2024). Horizon, three hours that start four stories and finish none, suggests the patience that serves him as an actor has no brake once he is also producer, writer and star. Its night attack on the settlement is properly frightening, and then the film wanders off to begin something else.

Further chapters are promised and may yet make the first look wise. Until then, the Costner we would send a stranger to is the one in someone else's film, standing near a Sarandon or a Connery, saying less than everyone around him and meaning more.