# Field of Dreams (1989)

### reviewed by
Walter Frith

    'Field of Dreams'

A retrospective movie review by Walter Frith

Member of the 'Internet Movie Critic's Association' at: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Studio/5713/index.html

When it was released in the spring of 1989, 'Field of Dreams' was a film that people talked about until the very next year when the film received three Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Screenplay Adaptation and Best Original Score. A movie theatre manager at the time, I can recall people's acute observations on the film. One gentleman commented that after seeing the film, "You wanted everybody in the world to be your friend". The film managed to find a theatre in my city that would show it for practically the entire year leading up to its Oscar race, and it eventually came away empty handed from the Academy. Perhaps the most preposterous shut out was in the Best Original Score category when Disney's easily forgettable score to 'The Little Mermaid' beat James Horner's lovely and emotionally feel good notes. It looks like Horner is poised to receive a long overdue Oscar for the 'Titanic' score, but that remains to be seen.

Acutely obvious but not easily done by other films, 'Field of Dreams' rides a wave of continued success for its overbearing simplicity. As the 1998 baseball season is about to get underway in less than a month, 'Field of Dreams' is a classic motion picture that commands every baseball fan to see it.

Written for the screen by its director Phil Alden Robinson, based on the book Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella, the phenomenal success the film enjoyed was derived from the fact that you didn't have to be a baseball fan to enjoy it and it appealed to people from all walks of life. Baseball was used only as a metaphor to enhance the story of one man's search for redemption and finding it in a baseball field he builds by sacrificing some of his rich farmland in the heart of Iowa after a strange voice tells him "if you build it, he will come".

Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) was a man always fascinated by the greatest game in the world, baseball. It was one of the things that kept him going but also reminded him of the painful relationship he shared with his father, deceased in the film, and how an ugly exchange of words forced Ray and his father to become alienated from each other over a disagreement about the status of 'Shoeless' Joe Jackson, portrayed in 'Field of Dreams' by Ray Liotta.

Jackson had been a player banned from baseball for life for throwing a World Series in the era of Babe Ruth (Ruth saved baseball after the scandal by being a top drawing card of the sport and symbolizing all that good about baseball) and the detailed examination of the infamous Black Sox scandal can be seen in the brilliant film 'Eight Men Out' (1988) from director John Sayles. Ray took exception to the fact that 'Shoeless' Joe had been his father's hero and said he "couldn't respect a man whose hero was a criminal".

Ray is excited that spirits from the past other than 'Shoeless' Joe have also come to his Iowa baseball field to play ball. One early evening, Ray hears the mysterious voice again, the same one that inspired him to build the baseball surface, and this time it tells Ray to "ease his pain". This leads Ray to Boston where he makes contact with Terence Mann, played splendidly by James Earl Jones. The two of them form an awkward relationship and travel to Minnesota to find a former baseball player turned physician (Burt Lancaster in his last big screen appearance).

The clever thing about 'Field of Dreams' is that it seems to have no point until the film's final scene when it all becomes clear. The film's dreamlike atmosphere and fantasy enhanced theme, displayed in a perfect flow of emotion from start to finish are symbolic to the very essence of its genre.

Visit FILM FOLLOW-UP by Walter Frith at: http://home.netinc.ca/~wfrith/movies.htm

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