“Field of Dreams”: If You Shoot It, Will They Come?

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. 

 

Running Wild with Jonathan Demme and Friends

Ever since the untimely death of Ray Liotta four months ago, I've been trying to get hold of Liotta’s 1986 breakout performance in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild. Three years before he played a ghostly Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams, four years before he went to the mattresses as Henry Hill in Goodfellas, Liotta was indelible as a former high school classmate of Melanie Griffith’s Lulu, a man with a hair-trigger temper and a great enjoyment for mayhem. He must have made quite an impression on my fellow movie-lovers. When—after his death at age 67--I started requesting the film from my local library, it took four months for it to end up in my DVD player.

 It was worth the wait.  After Hours, shot by Demme in 1986, is described online as an “action comedy.” But that designation doesn’t begin to suggest the film’s antic impact. At first it’s indeed very funny, showing a Wall Street financial nerd (Jeff Daniels) who can boast a big and very recent promotion falling under the spell of a gaudily-dressed party girl, played by Melanie Griffith (she of the babyish voice and the body that just won’t quit). This mismatched pair embarks on suburban adventures that feature alcohol, handcuffs, reckless driving, and thrill-seeking of all varieties. But just when we’re thoroughly enjoying their unlikely fling, the tone of the movie starts to shift dramatically. Griffith’s Lulu is not quite the carefree gal she seems to be, nor is Daniels’ uptight yuppie entirely telling the truth about his own placid homelife. And then there’s Liotta, showing up as Ray Sinclair at Lulu’s Pennsylvania high school reunion. Ray is handsome, charismatic, and alarmingly volatile, and when he appears the movie takes a left turn from which there’s no going back.

 It was Demme’s goal, at this fairly early point in his directing career, to try to meld screwball comedy and film noir. His bold experiment with a midpoint shift in tone made me, when I first saw the film, slightly queasy. This time around, I enjoyed Demme’s directorial sleight of hand for what it was. The film is a wild ride, and its unpredictable quality—in an era when we can generally figure out what’s coming next on our movie screen—now strikes me as hugely refreshing. I don’t always agree with the late Roger Ebert, but I love his description of Something Wild: “This is one of those rare movies where the plot seems surprised at what the characters do.” Exactly right!

 One of the most memorable aspects of Something Wild is the role played by Griffith’s costumes and hair stylings.  Clothes, in this film, do make the man  . . . or, in this case the woman. The sexy vagabond of the early scenes—with her brunette bob and her jangling jewelry—is suddenly transformed, later in the film, into a honey blonde who favors toned-down makeup and prim white frocks. Lulu’s costume changes signify the revelation of the various layers of her complicated psyche. There’s one more major costume shift at the tail-end of the film. It’s a final twist that many critics find arbitrary and not needed, and I think they’re right. But that’s the challenge of a script as eccentric as this one: knowing when to stop.  

 The film’s score ranges from the classic to contributions by such pop icons as Laurie Anderson and David Byrne. Unsurprisingly, the featured track is “Wild Thing,” performed in various versions. .A hip surprise is the cameo appearances by indie iconoclasts John Waters and John Sayles. They too can be considered something wild.