It’s hard to imagine how many truly idiotic projects have been launched, over the years, based on a hit movie’s promise that “if you build it, they will come.” To be honest, 1989’s Field of Dreams doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Just exactly WHY do the 1919 Chicago White Sox, in perennial disgrace for their role in throwing that year’s World Series, emerge from an Iowa cornfield because a young farmer who misses the Sixties has constructed a baseball field on his back forty? Why does this farmer idolize baseball, and long-ago White Sox batting champ Shoeless Shoe Jackson in particular, to the point that he’ll jeopardize his family’s economic future by taking direction from a mysterious voice? (And, come to think of it, why does his feisty wife put up with her husband’s fiscal craziness even though they might well find themselves homeless in future?)
But logic is not what Field of Dreams is all about. It’s about dreams, and in particular about the American male’s dream of a father/son bond symbolized by the idea of tossing around a baseball with your dad on a warm summer’s day. The give-and-take implicit in a simple game of catch seems to be craved by many men. At least, it is this element of the film’s climax that apparently turned many male moviegoers into emotional puddles when Field of Dreams screened in cineplexes across America in 1989. The movie attracted critics as well as audiences. It was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay; in 2017 it was welcomed onto the National Film Registry.
Before I rewatched Field of Dreams this past week, I of course remembered primarily Kevin Costner as the dreamy farmer with father issues and a great abiding love for America’s game. And I fleetingly remembered Amy Madigan as Costner’s supportive wife as well as Ray Liotta (always a distinctive actor) as the shadowy incarnation of Shoeless Joe. I did not recall Burt Lancaster in a small but key role as Archie “Moonlight” Graham, an actual long-ago outfielder who played only a single game in the major leagues before attending medical school and embarking on a long, distinguished stint as a smalltown doctor. Lancaster’s role, the last of his stellar career, allows him to hint that there are other kinds of glory than those found on a baseball diamond.
I also didn’t remember that Field of Dreams contains a major supporting role for James Earl Jones, the legendary actor with the basso profundo voice who left us just a few weeks ago at the age of 93. Jones played Terence Mann, a successful novelist who found fame in the Sixties, but now contends with small-minded readers who seek to ban his books. In the course of the film, Mann’s character is discovered to have a secret passion for baseball. Eventually he delivers a long, wonderful speech about baseball and its connection with America past and present. In the up-and-down history of our nation, says he, “the one constant through all the years has been baseball.” It is baseball that signifies “all that once was good, and could be again.”
The extras that accompany the DVD of Field of Dreams contain many clips of the film’s actors, producers, and writer/director Phil Alden Robinson. Almost all of them talk about their personal passion for baseball, and share memories of ballgames played with their dads. Jones is the exception: he never played catch with his absentee father. Still, he considered baseball a key part of his DNA, and his joyous performance here proves it.
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