It's hard to know what to like best about FIELD OF DREAMS (1989), but this is a great show to watch on a soft summer's evening when the worries of the world are far away and the weather forecast is for (to paraphrase a phrase from another Great Summer Movie , “Doc Hollywood”) "soft breezes through the willows and watch out for the lightning bugs." Of course, it is really a guy’s movie, a sort of testosterone-lite film. This is also a movie, after movies about watching the world turn into a giant snowball (The Day After Tomorrow), after being let down by Shrek 2 (Shrek 2), or after sleeping through Scary Movie #768 (take your pick) lull you to sleep, to make you fall in love with movies all over again. Simply go back through your collection of videos, go see if they still stock it at the video store, or if you have an enlightened library, they may have it there.

This was Kevin Costner’s starmaker movie. Up until that time he had been playing falling-off-your-horse-type supporting-actor-roles in movies like SILVERADO, but with F.O.D. he hit the BIG time. His career has had more ups and downs than a drunken pelican in a thunderstorm, but FIELD OF DREAMS was his launch vehicle to stardom. It also somehow reinforced his connection to baseball in the minds of the public, which he had established when he played in BULL DURHAM in 1988. If he had carried a baseball glove in DANCES WITH WOLVES we might have even forgiven him for that, so close was Costner attached to “America’s Pastime”.

I don't know what I like best about FIELD OF DREAMS. The story (a Capra-esque venture into fantasy-become-reality), the wonderful music ( James Horner), the actors (#1- best: James Earl Jones as “Terence Mann”, #2-great: Burt Lancaster as “Moonlight Graham”, #3-good: Kevin Costner as “Ray Kinsella”, #4-good: Amy Madigan as “Annie Kinsella”, and #5-honorable mention: Ray Liotta as “Shoeless Joe Jackson”), or the locations (best of all- an Iowa cornfield---an even eerier cornfield than Mel Gibson's in SIGNS.) Yet, out of everything, I think it's probably the improbable but beautiful story that I like the most.

The story is unique because it is really a tear-jerker for men. Costner is a green young farmer (a 1960s Berkley grad turned Iowa farmer?…hmmm…okay, suspend the imagination time) who hears a “voice” that persuades him to plow under his cash-crop corn and build a baseball diamond in a cornfield out in the middle of nowhere somewhere in Iowa. [Now think about that for just a second---how many movies would have the audacity to make you think that such a thing is actually possible…yet this one somehow does.] The motivation for all this is that the “voice” convinces Ray that if he will do this, he will bring Ray’s childhood hero, “Shoeless Joe Jackson,” a long-dead but legendary baseball player back to life [even more suspension of reality, but somehow it is still believable.] What unfolds touches the heart even as the mind is suspended.

The story all revolves around baseball, which is portrayed as the “soul of America.” Professional baseball is enshrined in the movie as the one eternal constant in American life. Well, okay, there is something to that. Middle Americans love pro baseball; it is the game of “the boys of summer” which leads up to the World Series. There was a time when, for a lot of people, particularly in the 1940s, that was so. But today a lot of people (many of whom find baseball a game too slow) could make the same case for pro football, pro basketball, pro golf, even NASCAR or the Indy 500. The “soul of America” is not really nailed down to pro baseball, but for the sake of the movie, we’ll allow the dog to wag us as the tail on that one just to see where the movie goes. And, love baseball or not, the movie takes men to tears without really being maudlin.

You don't see many movies like that around, ever, and certainly not much any more. Maybe it's because male audiences today are so collectively insecure that we all have to have that superhero up on the screen (Achilles, Spider Man, Neo, Riddick, et al.) and we males certainly don't want to bare our emotional vulnerabilities. No way, man. The girls can have their Ya-Ya Sisterhoods and their Steel Magnolias but we men are above all that. Hmm.

Back in the late 1980's (F.O.D. was released in 1989) there was a thing (in the USA anyway) called "The Men's Movement" which tried to get men to "get in touch with themselves," or to "connect with their feminine side." A lot of guys went into it, but eventually the "Men's Movement" seemed to strangle itself on psychobabble. Most men would rather, I suppose, get in touch with their "hunter-killer-fisherman" side, or their "farmer-gardener side," or their "competitive money-maker side," or their "let me go a-wandering side", than their feminine side. Homophobia? Not really the likely suspect. Nothing against women, but most men are just wired up a little differently. I mean, when was the last time you heard of a woman getting in touch with her "masculine side". A certain female rock star would be the exception, of course, but that's one of those outside-the-box things, as Dave Letterman might say.

But FIELD OF DREAMS was a movie, for some strange reason, that actually made men cry. Maybe it was about overcoming the Great Adversary of a Man's Life- his Father, and yet finding reconciliation with one's father. That voice in F.O.D. that "speaks" to Kevin Costner and tells him to build an "illogical" baseball field in the middle of an Iowa corn patch. "If you build it…he will come…" So against all logic Costner builds it, and, sure enough, his old hero Shoeless Joe Jackson shows up, like (as?) a ghost from the past. Along about this time Costner, as Ray Kinsella, tells his wife Annie about how he became alienated from his father when he was young because his father ran out of dreams and the Costner character couldn't stand him after that. Then the Dad died young. The voice says to Ray, "Ease his pain." But ease whose pain? We wonder. Shoeless Joe’s?

Toward the end of the movie, Shoeless Joe indicates that the "he" who was supposed to come isn't really…only…him---it’s Ray’s FATHER. And the business about "Ease his pain" probably refers to the FATHER who died before his time, before his OWN dreams, and before Ray could have a reconciliation with him. It is then that we sense, rather than really see, that Ray has some pain, the pain of unresolved alienation with his father, too. Thus, when Ray and his father are reunited, in Spirit, as it were, the pain that is eased--- is really BOTH men's pain. And every man who EVER had a hard time with his own father is---strangely, perhaps--- moved to cry at that point.

All of this heart of the story theme is sandwiched between some fine performances from Jones and Lancaster, and a not-too-shabby performance from Ray Liotta as Shoeless Joe, too. But the Ray Kinsella-and-his-father theme is the grabber.

One small but hilarious GEM within the movie is a little tangent it takes when Ray and Annie are at a school forum about censoring some “objectionable” books from the school library, with a few hundred other rural Iowa school parents. The meeting is portrayed as redneck heaven, maybe only two steps removed from the Klan. It is here that Annie (Amy) yells at an uptight, redneck, book-burning mom who is complaining about the revolutionary spirit of young people in the 1960s, something like, "How would you know? You never went through the Sixties. You had two Fifties back to back and went right on into the Seventies." Unforgettable.

This movie itself is unforgettable, too. Right up there with IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE and FORREST GUMP and all the other Capra-esque movies about how magic dreams can become real. On a soft summer night, it is…a dream. And the smiles at the end are for free.

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**** Four Stars

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LIGHTSPEED JUMP: If you enjoyed this movie review, you might enjoy reading a review of the offbeat Burt Reynolds Western, (click) THE MAN WHO LOVED CAT DANCING.
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Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children up to Age 4