FIELD OF DREAMS
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1989 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: A complex and witty fantasy film that features great performances by James Earl Jones and Kevin Costner. Even if you do not like our (stupid) national pastime, this film about ghosts of the White Sox and a quest is a solidly entertaining fantasy. Rating: low +3.
I do not like baseball. And because I do not like baseball, baseball films do not work on me as well as they do on other people. Most baseball movies assume that there is something somehow noble about playing baseball. I don't buy that. A good baseball for me is one that would still be good if you substituted professional wrestling as the game. PRIDE OF THE YANKEES just does not stack up very well under this criterion. You have to consider baseball important to respect Gehrig. BULL DURHAM is an okay but not great character comedy. BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY would still be a good study of the relationship of two men. I find that even with no respect for baseball, THE NATURAL remains a fine fantasy allegory of talent and treachery, of darkness and light. Now another baseball fantasy has come along with enough human values, enough fine acting, and a good enough script that it is well worth seeing even if (like me) you hate baseball. FIELD OF DREAMS is a real surprise: a (usually) genuine piece of quality writing for the screen.
Kevin Costner plays Ray Kinsella: a would-be ball player's son, a college activist in the late 1960s, and now an Iowa farmer. One day while working in the field he hears a disembodied voice tell him, "If you build it, he will come." After days of puzzling over hearing the message repeated, he has a vision that the "he" is Shoeless Joe Jackson of the White Sox (and, incidentally, of EIGHT MEN OUT), a personal hero of Ray's dead father. "It" seems to refer to a baseball diamond to be placed in Ray's cornfield. In time, the eight convicted White Sox have been wished out of the cornfield and are playing baseball in the field. Then another message comes and Ray finds himself on a mysterious mission to Boston to find controversial 1960s writer Terence Mann, supremely played by James Earl Jones. Jones's performance is quirky and brilliant. Mann's first meeting with Ray is worth the ticket price all by itself. Ray continues his ridiculous set of tasks and quests until at the end it all comes together and makes sense.
Faults? Well, over the rest of the story there is superimposed a rather prosaic "save the farm" plot that gets into the way of some of the better story-telling. Then toward the end of the film there is a rather gratuitous piece of cheap suspense. It is needed for the larger plot-- almost every shot in this film is--but the actual cause of the suspense seems forced. Universal has taken a chance on an intelligent fantasy film with a complex script and has made one of the best films of the year. I would give it a low +3 on the -4 to +4 scale. Pity it was about baseball.
Mark R. Leeper
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Copyright 1989 Mark R. Leeper
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