So obviously Field of Dreams is on my mind today, since I saw some of it last night.
I've said what I need to say (for now) about the role of the wife in that film (although a great conversation continues to go on in the comments section) - but there's so much more about that film that is enjoyable. I'll do a ginormous post about it one of these days (heh heh - feel free to remind me) where I rant and rave about all my favorite parts. There are so many.
In the meantime, I went and found Ebert's review of it and was pleased as punch to find that he pointed out the same thing I pointed out about the wife. You know. It made me feel really smart and stuff like that.
Field of Dreams
BY ROGER EBERT / April 21, 1989
The farmer is standing in the middle of a cornfield when he hears the voice for the first time: "If you build it, he will come." He looks around and doesn't see anybody. The voice speaks again, soft and confidential: "If you build it, he will come." Sometimes you can get too much sun, out there in a hot Iowa cornfield in the middle of the season. But this isn't a case of sunstroke.
Up until the farmer starts hearing voices, "Field of Dreams" is a completely sensible film about a young couple who want to run a family farm in Iowa. Ray and Annie Kinsella (Kevin Costner and Amy Madigan) have tested the fast track and had enough of it, and they enjoy sitting on the porch and listening to the grass grow. When the voice speaks for the first time, the farmer is baffled, and so was I: Could this be one of those religious pictures where a voice tells the humble farmer where to build the cathedral? It's a religious picture, all right, but the religion is baseball. And when he doesn't understand the spoken message, Ray is granted a vision of a baseball diamond, right there in his cornfield.
If he builds it, the voice seems to promise, Joe Jackson will come and play on it - Shoeless Joe, who was a member of the infamous 1919 Black Sox team but protested until the day he died that he played the best he could.
As "Field of Dreams" developed this fantasy, I found myself being willingly drawn into it. Movies are often so timid these days, so afraid to take flights of the imagination, that there is something grand and brave about a movie where a voice tells a farmer to build a baseball diamond so that Shoeless Joe Jackson can materialize out of the cornfield and hit a few fly balls. This is the kind of movie Frank Capra might have directed, and James Stewart might have starred in - a movie about dreams.
It is important not to tell too much about the plot. (I'm grateful I knew nothing about the movie when I went to see it, but the ads give away the Shoeless Joe angle.) Let it be said that Annie supports her husband's vision, and that he finds it necessary to travel east to New Jersey so that he can enlist the support of a famous writer (James Earl Jones) who has disappeared from sight, and north to Minnesota to talk to what remains of a doctor (Burt Lancaster) who never got the chance to play with the pros.
The movie sensibly never tries to make the slightest explanation for the strange events that happen after the diamond is constructed.
There is, of course, the usual business about how the bank thinks the farmer has gone haywire and wants to foreclose on his mortgage (the Capra and Stewart movies always had evil bankers in them). But there is not a corny, stupid payoff at the end. Instead, the movie depends on a poetic vision to make its point.
The director, Phil Alden Robinson, and the writer, W.P. Kinsella, are dealing with stuff that's close to the heart (it can't be a coincidence that the author and the hero have the same last name).
They love baseball, and they think it stands for an earlier, simpler time when professional sports were still games and not industries.
There is a speech in this movie about baseball that is so simple and true that it is heartbreaking. And the whole attitude toward the players reflects that attitude. Why do they come back from the great beyond and play in this cornfield? Not to make any kind of vast, earthshattering statement, but simply to hit a few and field a few, and remind us of a good and innocent time.
It is very tricky to act in a movie like this; there is always the danger of seeming ridiculous. Costner and Madigan create such a grounded, believable married couple that one of the themes of the movie is the way love means sharing your loved one's dreams. Jones and Lancaster create small, sharp character portraits - two older men who have taken the paths life offered them, but never forgotten what baseball represented to them in their youth.
"Field of Dreams" will not appeal to grinches and grouches and realists. It is a delicate movie, a fragile construction of one goofy fantasy after another. But it has the courage to be about exactly what it promises. "If you build it, he will come." And he does. In a baseball movie named "The Natural," the hero seemed almost messianic.
"Field of Dreams" has a more modest aim. The ghost of Shoeless Joe does not come back to save the world. He simply wants to answer that wounded cry that has become a baseball legend: "Say it ain't so, Joe!" And the answer is, it ain't.
Posted by sheilaThis post led me to this site I think you'll like:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/moviespeeches.htm
Posted by: Scott Janssens at May 25, 2005 2:09 PMThat site is so cool, Scott!!
Posted by: red at May 25, 2005 2:21 PM"Hey, Dad... you wanna have a catch?"
Takes a guy a lot stronger than me to withstand that one. One of the all-time greats.
Posted by: Rob at May 25, 2005 3:53 PMYou're right about the wife, red. And Ebert is right about this being a fragile movie. If the relationship between the husband and the wife didn't ring true, the whole thing would basically come tumbling down. I think it's the authenticity and natural-ness of that relationship that makes it possible to suspend one's disbelief regarding other aspects of the film. The quiet power of those scenes between husband and wife are my strongest memory of the first time I saw it...
Posted by: MikeR at May 25, 2005 4:52 PMRob: GULP!!
It's like a Pavlovian response for me now ... I see it, I hear the quick catch in the father's voice when he says, "I'd like that ..." and I am DONE.
PUT A FORK IN ME.
Posted by: red at May 25, 2005 4:53 PM"I found myself being willingly drawn into it."
Yup. In fact, I'd be tempted to add it to the list of "100 All-Time [Greatest] Movies". And you, and Ebert, and MikeR, are completely right that the husband and wife, and especially Amy Madigan's role, is crucial to the film's success.
And I know you OWN this movie.. and while I was never completely convinced by the conversion of the sceptical brother(?).. but I'll stick my neck out and say that although Roger Ebert is, mostly, right about the portrayal of the players when he writes - "Why do they come back from the great beyond and play in this cornfield? Not to make any kind of vast, earthshattering statement, but simply to hit a few and field a few, and remind us of a good and innocent time." - my memory of the movie is that there was the implication that all the players - and the point is made by a great performance by Ray Liotta as Shoeless Joe - were taking the opportunity to make up for somehow missing out on time spent playing baseball (and pursuing their dreams) when they were alive.
Posted by: peteb at May 25, 2005 5:55 PMI saw this movie in a theatre, was taken by the father/son stuff, but not overwhelmed. In between then and the first time it ran on TV, my father passed away. Now I did not have issues with my Dad, like the Kinsella character, and I didn't need to be reconciled, but I did miss him and we did play catch, A LOT. Anyway I'm watching and have no idea a truck is going to hit me until it happens, the exact moment Rob and our host have mentioned in comments. The invitation to catch, the, well yes, catch in the Dad's voice. I bawled, not cried but bawled for 5 minutes. More than I ever have before or since.
Fast forward about 5-6 years. I haven't seen the movie again, although I'm not actively avoiding it. Channel surfing, I settle on a special about baseball and movies, probably ESPN or HBO, but I don't remember. It's not even the damn movie. There is no buildup, no background, they just cut to that scene and BAM! I did it again.
Since then I have watched portions of it from time to time, and I start losing it when the Whaley/Lancaster character makes his sacrifice.
This movie is the Terms of Endearment for men.
Posted by: MarkG at May 25, 2005 6:04 PMpeteb: I think you're right - that's how the movie occurs to me - however, that vibe is merely IMPLIED, never stated. At least not by the ballplayers. The baseball guys are not suffused in a mystic glow of regret. They are trash-talking athletes, psyched to just get on the field again. They emerge from the cornfield, stare at the baseball field for a long silent while ... and instead of walking around in a reverent silence, they all charge forward onto the field, screaming and whooping like little boys at a Little League game.
So I think they do just want to come back and play some ball again.
One of the reasons the movie works for me is this choice too - to not sentimentalize the baseball players. We sort of sentimentalize Shoeless Joe BUT Ray Liotta does not, most definitely does not, play him in a sentimental way.
he plays him like a hungry athlete, starved to get out there again. We don't get any speeches, not really - It's all implied. Which I think is just a brilliant choice.
If there is any deeper meaning to these guys returning from the grave to Iowa - it is because we want to see it, and because of the feelings we place on baseball here in this country.
Posted by: red at May 25, 2005 6:07 PMTotally Sheila. That there was a decision not to sentimentalise was what I was implying.. and that the decision works because of the performances by the actors.
Although I think it works beyond "the feelings we place on baseball here in this country."
There's a more universal appeal there. :)
It's what's not explicitly stated in the movie that makes it great.. there's a reliance on an intelligent audience to join the dots.
Posted by: peteb at May 25, 2005 6:17 PMWell, since we're sharing, let me tell you one of the roles this film plays in my life.
I've been an emergency room and ICU chaplain and somewhere along the way, in order to survive, you learn to set yourself aside. You get a call to the neo-natal intensive care unit because a 10-day old baby just died and you can't exactly let yourself be the blubbering mess you want to be. Over time, you learn to bottle the emotions.
Then I get cancer - again - and the wife worries because I'm dealing with it clinically, the way I would as a chaplain in a cancer patient's room. It all bottles up. Each treatment makes you sadder, weaker, and more angry. Maybe your cat dies or you get an unfavorable scan result and you have no emotional response at all.
Finally, you need to get it out before it destroys you. You need that healthy release. For me, there are two movies that break me down no matter how much I fight them: Field of Dreams and My Life.
By the time I get to the "have a catch" scene, I'm already gone. It starts for me when the little girl says that daddy doesn't have to sell the farm. Wow. Catharsis.
Sometimes I watch it just because it's a great movie, but the results are the same.
Posted by: Big Dan at May 25, 2005 8:53 PMDan - I SO know what you mean - at least about needing to watch certain films just to give yourself a catharsis. Sometimes if I know that I just need to have a huge cry, and I can't get there myself, I'll pop in Apollo 13. For some reason, it just gets me. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
Same thing with Running on Empty, and Field of Dreams.
These movies are my sure thing catharsis-es. Catharsi?
Posted by: red at May 25, 2005 11:41 PMCathartheses is wrong, but more fun to say. I say we make that the plural.
Posted by: Big Dan at May 26, 2005 8:29 AMDude, I lose it when Ray Liotta says, "Man, I did love this game. I'd have played for food money. It was the game... The sounds, the smells. . It was the crowd, rising to their feet when the ball was hit deep. Shoot, I'd play for nothing!"
Mostly because I know of NO players today who'd say that, except for a certain 7-year-old in my house.