20 Years Later, ‘field of Dreams’ is Still the Standard of Sports Movies
I was moved the first time I saw in in 1989. It still was moving to me, as I watched it again, just last week, for what must have been the 1,000th time.
Field Of Dreams goes beyond the feel good, stand up and cheer as the featured team exits the field, diamond, court or ice reaching the pinnacle of their sport. There are only so many of those that I can stomach, before I get physically sick.
But it is the quintessential stand up and cheer movie as the featured player, Ray Kinsella, can finally have a game of catch with his deceased father.
It is a movie filled with all sorts of atonements. It is a movie about people rebuilding lost relationships. It is a movie about people following their faith and being rewarded for it, even in the face of public ridicule and scorn.
“If you build it, HE will come” has become not only the main premise of the movie, but also it has become a catch phrase of the ages. The faceless voice that whispers to Kinsella in his Iowa corn field, sets him on a journey to recover a lost relationship with his father. Along the way, he is also able to “ease his pain”, the pain of a 1960’s radical leader who grew up following the Brooklyn Dodgers and after their move to Los Angeles, lost his love for the game and threw himself into the self-righteous movements and causes of the ’60s era. He was also able to “go the distance”, in allowing an aged, small town Minnesota doctor, to fulfill his dream and have an official Major League at bat, 17 years after he died.
Field of Dreams is NOT a baseball movie. There are no game winning home runs. There are no steals of second. No-hitters won’t be found. It’s a movie about human redemption that just so happens to come together and happened on a baseball diamond, in the middle of an Iowa corn field.
The film came out at a time when actor Kevin Costner was coming off another anti-baseball movie in Bull Durham, and a few years before he hit the big time awards movie and his opus in Dances with Wolves. He brilliantly portrayed Kinsella as a ’60s liberal revolutionary, who grew up to do the conservative thing and become a farmer. With the help of his wife “Annie” (Amy Madigan) and daughter “Karin” (Gaby Hoffman), he had seemingly settled down into his new found life, working to get the corn crops and provide for his familiys existence.
Along the way, we find out that his late father was a huge baseball fan, in particular, a “Shoeless” Joe Jackson fan. To get back at his father during his rebellious teen years, he insulted his father by insulting his favorite player, calling Jackson a “criminal” and setting in motion a series of events that led Kinsella to plow down about 3 acres of his crop, to build a baseball diamond and allow “Shoeless’ Joe to return to the field (after he had been banned from baseball after being found guilty of throwing the 1919 world series).
The relationship with his father had become so strained that “Having a game of catch had become a chore, like mowing the lawn or taking out the trash” and set up the movies final scene, when John Kinsella returned to his sons field of dreams, to have that final game of catch and repair their relationship. The regret of Ray Kinsella was brilliantly displyed in the line “The son-of-a-bitch died before I could take it back” (“it” being the insult he hurled at his father about Jackson being a criminal).
After building the field and getting to meet Jackson (Ray Liotta) on it, the voice reappears, telling Ray to “ease his pain”, which turned out to be the pain of writer Terrance Mann’s (James Earl Jones) lost love of baseball. The voice sent Kinsella from Iowa to Boston to take Mann to a Red Sox game, where the voice tells them to “go the distance” to Chism, Minnesota, to look up a former ball player, Archie “Moonlight” Graham (Burt Lancaster/Frank Whaley), who fit into the story because he once had the opprotunity to become a major league player, but through a series of events, made his own legacy in small town America by becoming a doctor instead.
As the movie began to wind down, we had all of the participants in place. Kinsella, Mann and Graham (who appeared as a young ball player, hitchhiking his way to find a team to play for and being picked up by Kinsella and Mann, who were returning to the Iowa farm) return to Iowa.
It set up what has to be, the greatest soliloquy since Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”. James Earl Jones spoke it in response to Ray being pressured to give up the farm because that baseball field was costing them too much money to keep. From the mind of his 6 year old daughter, who came up with the idea that people would pay to see this field, it set up Jones’ imortal words:
“People will come, Ray.
They’ll come to lowa, for reasons they can’t even fathom. They’ll turn up your
driveway, not knowing for sure why they’re doing it. They’ll arrive at your door,
as innocent as children, longing for the past.
‘Of course, we won’t mind if you look around,’ you’ll say. ‘It’s only $20 per
person.’
They’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it. For it is money they
have and peace they like. Then they’ll walk off to the bleachers and sit in their
shirtsleeves, on a perfect afternoon.
They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines
where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes and they’ll
watch the game and it will be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters.
The memories will be so thick, they will have to brush them away from their
faces.
The one constant through all the years Ray, has been baseball. America has
rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt,
and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.
This field, this game…it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that
once was good and it could be again.
People will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.”
That scene in itself beats any walk off home run scene ever created.
20 years later, I can blame Field of Dreams for my complete disinterst in the
game of baseball. The movie is about the purity of the game, not the prima
donnas who play it. It about bringing fathers and sons together, not game
winning touch down catches. Its about a love affair for the game. Its about
altering lives.
But it also strikes a spiritual chord. Its about faith. Its about following
through with something completely illogical and finding a reward for doing
so. It cares less about the action on the field rather than the lives it
touches off the field. The film showed that the game was the magnet, and
the people were the individuals who were attracted to it.
Is it heaven? No! It’s Iowa. But maybe, it is Heaven.
The film is still perfect!
Marcus Robbins
http://www.articlesbase.com/sports-and-fitness-articles/20-years-later-field-of-dreams-is-still-the-standard-of-sports-movies-722430.html
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