Field Of Dreams (1989)
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Field of Dreams (1989) is a fairy tale celebration of the love of baseball, adapted by screenwriter/director Phil Alden Robinson from W. P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe. The film is almost dreamlike (aided by the mystical score by James Horner). Just one year after playing catcher "Crash" Davis in Bull Durham (1988), Kevin Costner appeared in this second sports film - another baseball-themed film coupled with the religious themes of faith and redemption. This sentimental, modern fantasy classic became a smash hit in its unique depiction of Americana.
Standing in the middle of a cornfield, an idealistic, transplanted city boy-turned-Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) repeatedly hears a ghostly Voice - the words of discredited "Shoeless" Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta), a member of the infamous 1919 Chicago Black Sox baseball team that threw the World Series. It tells him to build a baseball diamond in the middle of his corn field, to "ease his pain":
If you build it, he will come.He also hears other cryptic messages, such as "Go the distance." So with this idealistic and crazy vision, he builds a baseball field with bleachers and floodlights right in the middle of a cornfield. [The field exists in reality on Don Lansing's farm in Dyersville, Iowa.]
Ray's wife Annie (Amy Madigan) is semi-supportive but worried about their finances. No one but those who believe can see the ghostly ballplayers who begin to appear. [This Capra-esque film recalls Harvey (1950), a film in which its main character believes he is befriended by a giant rabbit that no one can see. (Ray's daughter Karen (Gaby Hoffmann) is watching Harvey on T.V. at one point in the film, to emphasize the connection.)] The ghosts of "Shoeless" Joe and other Sox players, disgraced in the 1919 scandal, come back from the dead, and appear for a few games with Ray - to be rehabilitated.
Ray travels to Boston to see controversial 60s writer, a disillusioned and reclusive, J.D. Salinger-like Terence Mann (James Earl Jones), to help him seek out the meaning of the voices and the purpose for the field.
Mann tells him, in a memorable speech, how baseball once reflected the best about America:
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, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again. Oh people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.He also meets with a small town doctor, Dr. "Moonlight" Graham (Burt Lancaster in his final theatrical film role), a rookie player who years earlier yearned to make it into the major leagues, but whose pro baseball career was limited to only one inning. The ballfield becomes a place where people who have sacrificed parts of their lives for others are given a second chance.
The film climaxes with Ray's reconciliation scene with his dead father.
