Summer Homestand: Field of Dreams
Every Wednesday between now and the end of baseball season the Cru Jones Society brings you a new baseball movie examined for both overall entertainment value and treatment of our favorite game. To suggest a film, email us at staff [at] crujonessociety.com. Otherwise, pour yourself an $8 beer, crack some shells, and let’s play ball.
Date Released: April 21, 1989
Box Office Total: $64,431,625
Team Featured: 1919 Chicago Black Sox
“You know we just don’t recognize the most significant moments of our lives while they’re happening. Back then I thought, well, there’ll be other days. I didn’t realize that that was the only day.” – Dr. Archibald “Moonlight” Graham.
Most people don’t get “other days” in their lives. Field of Dreams is a fantasy story about a whole collection of people who get their other days and one more chance to live their dreams, right their wrongs, and experience the nirvana of second chances. All told through the prism of baseball.
Plot Synopsis
Ray Kinsella, played by Kevin Costner, is a farmer in the middle of Nowhere, Iowa who has worked his entire life to alienate his father who dies shortly after he gets married. Ray is a former hippie who buys a farm, raises his family, and in the midst of endless acres of corn hears a voice that urges him, “If you build it, he will come.” The voices persist until somehow Ray divines that he should build a baseball field in the middle of his cornfield in order to get Shoeless Joe Jackson to come back to life and be able to play baseball again. His wife, defying all logic, agrees to this patently ridiculous idea and Ray commences building his baseball field.
It’s at this point in the plot I was thinking two things. 1) Based on the improbability and absurdity of this entire premise a mere 10 minutes in, a spaceship could have landed in the middle of the movie, and it would have seemed not at all out of place. 2) His deduction of “If you build it, he will come” to “I need to build a baseball diamond so a disgraced dead baseball player can play again” ranks up there with Schwarzenegger figuring out that to find Christ in New York, he should look up Christine York in the fucking phone book in End of Days is one of the most egregious leaps of logic ever committed to film.
Regardless, Shoeless Joe shows up, shags a few fly balls, takes some batting practice, and discovers the one catch with his field – he, nor any of the other disgraced ghost ballplayers, can step off the field. More ballplayers eventually show up, and the voice tells Ray to “Ease his pain” which naturally means driving to Boston, kicking over the rock an obscure reclusive 60s satirist named Terrance Mann lives under, and taking him to Fenway where they both hear the voice again urging them to “Go the distance” while the name Moonlight Graham appears on the scoreboard.
So they drive to Minnesota together, find this guy who is now dead, head back to Iowa, pick up Moonlight Graham’s 22 year-old ghost, and return to Ray’s cornfield diamond where yet more players have congregated. Meanwhile, the threat of foreclosure looms over the family as Ray has sacrificed his most profitable crop for an ostensibly (to the outside world anyway) empty baseball field. Ray’s daughter then chokes on a hot dog, Moonlight Graham emerges from the field, this time as an old man, saves his daughter’s life, and the players take Terrance Mann back into the corn with them leaving Ray to play catch with the ghost of his estranged father. A huge line of cars emerges, and Ray won’t have to sell his farm after all because this quiet Iowa town is now a metaphysical tourist attraction.
Writing the plot out expositionally like that enlightens just how fucking strange this movie is in concept. Thankfully, that nonsensical weirdness really has no bearing on how you relate to it. I’ll explain below.
Treatment of Baseball/Quality of Baseball Scenes:
During Shoeless Joe’s first appearance at Kinsella’s field, he gives a beautifully romantic description of how much he loves this game. He describes putting a glove or a ball up to his face and just enjoying the smells of baseball. He talks about loving taking the trains from town to town for games. He talks about “waking up with the smell of the baseball field in his nose” and recounts how desperately he misses the game since his suspension. He eventually asks Ray if his field is heaven. Ray answers, “No. It’s Iowa.”
If you ever loved this game, I defy you not to get chills or a little nostalgically misty listening to Ray Liotta as Shoeless Joe describe his love of the game. His love is sincere, his descriptions heartfelt, and his memories painted in the most vivid of colors.
As the other Black Sox players show up, we’re treated to some Grade-A trash talking, decent baseball practice, and more starry-eyed baseball romanticism. Don’t take that description as pejorative because I could listen to people wax poetic about my favorite game all day and all night. And watching this movie, that’s what we pretty much do. Later in the movie, Moonlight Graham recites another soliloquy about staring down a pitcher that rivals any other piece of baseball poetry ever written.
As far as the baseball scenes themselves, well, we don’t get many of those. And mostly the guys just practice. This movie plays less like a sports flick, and more like a road trip movie crossed with wide-eyed fantasy. There’s very little sports action to speak of, but plenty of dialogue designed to tug at the heart strings while getting inside the mind of a baseball player as he goes about his job.
And this dialogue is fantastic. Watching this movie you know the writers are baseball lovers themselves, and they know that the only better than playing baseball is talking about baseball. How it feels to stand on a field, what it’s like to stand in anticipation in the batter’s box, what the air smells like, how the grass feels under your feet – they’re all given loving attention to detail throughout. It’s like audio porn for baseballphiles.
Annoying Romantic B-Story/Stifling Spouse?
For as fantastical as the premise is, its most unbelievable aspect is how cool Ray’s wife Annie is with all his hallucinatory concoctions. She puts up some token resistance to every new directive the mystical voice gives Ray, but always relents and goes along with his cockeyed schemes in the face of crushing debt, shame from a town full of doubting jerks, and every last shred of basic common sense she has. In any other movie, she’s in his face, questioning his masculinity, stifling all of his efforts, and just generally being a pain in the ass because the plot requires her to do so since Hollywood has no idea how to write for women.
In Field of Dreams, Annie reluctantly supports Ray’s bizarre efforts because of his relentless sincerity. If you’re in a marriage built on trust, sometimes that’s just what you do. You trust your husband’s insane contrivances and hope it works out for the best. Fortunately for the Kinsellas, in this movie it does. Greatly appreciated the effort of Amy Madigan here. She adds a dose of common sense without throwing a bucket of water over the entire proceedings.
Final Thoughts
I find it amusing that Timothy Busfield, who plays all-star 1st baseman Lou Collins in Little Big League, and subsequently has his number retired by the Twins as we find out in the third installment of Major League, plays the stifling, nay-saying dickhead brother-in-law who tries to get Ray to shut down his field and sell his farm. It’s also weird that the Black Sox 1st baseman played by Art LaFleur also plays the ghost of Babe Ruth in The Sandlot who tells Benny to pickle the beast. What these things mean – I don’t know.
But I suspect it has to do with the timelessness of baseball. If you love baseball, you’ll always come back to it one way or another. And considering Kevin Costner has made at least three of these movies (the other two to be covered by yours truly here in the coming weeks), I think it’s safe to say we’ll see these guys again wearing yet another uniform.
Which brings me to my final point, and one I’ve been careful to avoid until the end. When I first approached this review, I had the ending already written in my head. It was to go something like this:
“Field of Dreams tirelessly and shamelessly pulls at your heart strings with a big, sweeping score, vague mysticism, and heavy handed emotional ploys. Essentially this movie is a huge Rube Goldberg device to demonstrate that it’s important to play catch with your dad when you have the chance. Well, I played tons of catch with my dad growing up, and I didn’t need to bankrupt my damn family and drive halfway across the country to do it. Call me cold-hearted, but I just can’t get worked up over this type of contrived sentimentality.”
It’s a good thing I watched this again because even though the point still stands that I have no regrets about my relationship with my father – we still have a wonderful relationship to this day filled with more times playing catch than I can even count – I couldn’t help but get a little choked up at the transcendent “Hey Dad, wanna have a catch?” line just like everyone else.
And that’s what’s really important about this movie. There’s no need to take it as literally as I was prepared to. It makes no bones about being a total fantasy, and it’s there for you to extract whatever it is you need to extract from it. That’s why we have fantasies in the first place. Even though I have a great relationship with my dad, I’m writing this at 11:00 p.m. on a Monday and want to call him just to tell him I love him and that the next time we get together, “let’s have a catch.”
While this movie manipulates to the highest degree, I think its intentions are good. And maybe I’m softening in my old age, but when you couple good intentions with some of the best romantic descriptions of baseball ever written, that’s good enough for a recommendation from me. No matter how you’re feeling going in, after you watch Field of Dreams, you’ll feel just a little bit better.
Ruling from the Scorer: Game-winning sacrifice fly in extra innings.
08 Jul 2009 E Dagger