Field of Dreams

The farmer is standing in the middle of a cornfield when he hears the voice for the first time: “If you build it, he will come.” He looks around and doesn’t see anyone. The voice once again says, soft and hush-hush: “If you build it, he will come.” Roger Ebert said in his review, “Sometimes you can get too much sun, out there in a hot Iowa cornfield in the middle of the season. But this isn’t a case of sunstroke.”

Right to the part when the farmer starts hearing these whispers, “Field of Dreams,” released in 1989, is a completely reasonable film about a young couple who want to run a family farm in Iowa. Ray and Annie Kinsella, played by Kevin Costner and Amy Madigan, have tested the fast track and can’t do that anymore, and they enjoy sitting on the porch and watching their grass grow. Ebert said, “When the voice speaks for the first time, the farmer is baffled, and so was I: Could this be one of those religious pictures where a voice tells the humble farmer where to build the cathedral?”

Yes, this is a religious movie, but the religion is baseball. When he doesn’t understand the voice, Ray is given a vision of a baseball diamond, right on his cornfield.

If he builds it, the voice sounds clairvoyant, Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) will come and play on it – Shoeless Joe, who was a team player on the infamous 1919 Black Sox team but protested until the day he died that he played the best he could.

Ebert said, “As “Field of Dreams” developed this fantasy, I found myself being willingly drawn into it.” Movies are really fearful nowadays, so afraid to take on these imaginations, that there is something huge and courageous about a movie where a voice tells a farmer to build a baseball diamond so that Shoeless Joe Jackson can appear in the cornfield and start playing ball. Ebert makes the right description, “This is the kind of movie Frank Capra might have directed, and James Stewart might have starred in -- a movie about dreams.”

The best thing to do is not give a lot of the plot away. (Ebert admitted, “I’m grateful I knew nothing about the movie when I went to see it, but the ads give away the Shoeless Joe angle.”) It’s best that Annie supports Ray’s vision, and how he sees it’s needed to drive to Boston so that he can get the help of a famous writer (James Earl Jones) who has disappeared, and north to Minnesota to talk to the spirit of a doctor (the great Burt Lancaster) who never got the chance to play with the pros.

The movie wisely never tries to make the smallest explanation for the strange events that happen after the diamond is made.

Of course, the usual business happens about how the bank thinks Ray has lost his mind and wants to foreclose on his mortgage (the Capra and Stewart movies always had evil bankers in them). However, there is not a corny, stupid payoff at the end. Instead, the movie relies on a poetic look to make its point.

The director, Phil Alden Robinson, and the writer, W.P. Kinsella, are dealing with a story that’s close to the heart (it can’t be a concurrence that the author and the protagonist share a last name).

They love baseball, and they think it stands for a nicer time in the past when professional sports were still games and not business.

There is a speech in this movie about baseball that is so nice and true that it is motivating. The behavior toward the players reflects the attitude. Ebert asks, “Why do they come back from the great beyond and play in this cornfield? Not to make any kind of vast, earthshattering statement, but simply to hit a few and field a few, and remind us of a good and innocent time.”

It is a difficult task to do in a movie like this. There is always the risk of being ridiculous. Costner and Madigan make a really relatable, realistic married couple that one of the themes of the movie is the way love means sharing your partner’s dreams. Jones and Lancaster cream small, great character pictures – two older men who have taken the paths life gave them, but never forgotten what baseball represented to them when they were young.

Ebert said, ““Field of Dreams” will not appeal to grinches and grouches and realists. It is a delicate movie, a fragile construction of one goofy fantasy after another. But it has the courage to be about exactly what it promises. “If you build it, he will come.” And he does. In a baseball movie named “The Natural,” the hero seemed almost messianic.”

“Field of Dreams” has a more modest take. The spirit of Shoeless Joe does not return to save the world. He just wants to answer that sad call that has become a baseball legend: “Say it ain’t so, Joe!” And the answer is it ain’t.

My dad and I both say this is one of our favorite movies of all time. We really love how this movie is showing the nicer time of baseball and how all the spirits of baseball players in the past come back to just play a simple sport. My dad was really young when his dad passed away, so seeing this movie makes him wish that something like this could happen so that the spirit of his dad could come back. It’s an emotional film, so if you cry while watching it, I won’t be surprised. However, this is a movie that you should not miss out on because it’s a classic that needs to be seen. Afterwards, you will be saying the famous lines, “If you build it, he will come,” “Go the distance” and “Ease his pain.”

Look out next week where we look at a nice movie on a famous fantasy character in the continuation of “Kevin Costner Month.”