Phil Alden Robinson (1989)
The second half of what turned out to be a baseball-movie double bill: Barry Levinson’s The Natural (1984) was about to disappear from Netflix, Phil Alden Robinson’s Field of Dreams soon to leave Amazon Prime Video (at least as a free watch for Prime subscribers). Neither will be a great loss; I’m not sure which film is worse, but Robinson’s is undoubtedly weirder – at least as a concept. Thirty-six-year-old Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) has recently turned his hand to corn farming in Iowa. Walking through a cornfield one evening, Ray hears a voice telling him that, ‘If you build it, he will come’. After hearing the voice again, he has a vision of a baseball diamond in the cornfield, and, in the middle of the diamond, a player whom Ray recognises. He is the legendary ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta), the most famous name among the eight Chicago White Sox players involved in the ‘Black Sox’ scandal of the 1919 World Series. Jackson and his teammates, who allegedly conspired to fix the Series by throwing games, were banned from professional baseball thereafter. Joe Jackson died in 1951. It’s the present day, the late 1980s, when he appears, still a young man, in Ray’s cornfield and gets into conversation with its owner.
It doesn’t feel like the late 1980s, though, because Field of Dreams seems to be happening in a timeless zone – goldenly glowing, vaguely nostalgic though definitely Hollywood; a place where the laws of nature can be defied and dreams come true. This impression eclipses a welter of specific dates and locations in Ray’s opening voiceover, accompanied by visual aids from the Kinsella family photograph album. Ray’s father, John, was born in North Dakota in 1896. John never saw a big city until, after service in France as a doughboy, he returned to America in 1918 and settled in Chicago, where he became an ardent White Sox supporter. John himself played in minor leagues before moving to Brooklyn in 1935, marrying in 1938, becoming a father in 1952 and a widower three years later. ‘Instead of Mother Goose’, explains Ray,
‘I was put to bed at night with stories of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and the great Shoeless Joe Jackson. Dad was a Yankees fan then, so of course I rooted for Brooklyn. But in ’58 the Dodgers moved away, so we had to find other things to fight about. We did. And when it came time to go to college, I picked the farthest one from home I could find.’
Ray enrolled at Berkeley as an English student but his major ‘really was the Sixties … I marched, I smoked some grass, I tried to like sitar music …’. At Berkeley he also met his future wife, Annie (Amy Madigan). After graduation, Ray sold insurance, then drove a cab, then worked in a pizzeria. He and Annie married in late 1974, a few months after John Kinsella died. Over a decade later – by which time he and his wife are parents, with a daughter, Karin (Gaby Hoffmann) – Annie has talked Ray into buying a farm in her native Iowa.
Almost buried in this surfeit of biographical data is Ray’s admission that ‘Until I heard the voice … I’d never done a crazy thing in my whole life’. He feels compelled to listen to the voice’s cryptic advice: Ray takes this to mean that he should build a baseball field in the middle of his farmland – never mind the huge financial risk to his family’s livelihood – and that Shoeless Joe Jackson will come there to play baseball again. Annie backs her husband to the hilt in this extraordinary venture, but her relatives think Ray is nuts and the townspeople arrive in force to jeer at the baseball field, floodlights and all. There’s an even bigger turnout for a PTA meeting at a local school, where Beulah Perkins (Lee Garlington), an outraged parent, is the rabid spokesperson for a campaign to ban from the syllabus the ‘pornographic’ works of a writer called Terence Mann. This can’t be Karin Kinsella’s school – she’s only about six years old – but Ray and Annie turn up anyway, because Terence Mann was a campus favourite when they were students. Annie does all the anti-censorship talking at the PTA meeting, but it’s enough, despite her profane, abusive turn of phrase, to win round everyone there except Beulah Perkins. During the meeting, Ray says only, to himself, ‘Terence Mann … Terence Mann’. By now, the voice in the cornfield has started a new mantra, ‘Ease his pain’. Ray is convinced that this refers to Mann, who stopped writing novels and disappeared from public view as the Sixties became the Seventies. Ray resolves to seek him out.
Field of Dreams is soon puzzling beyond its mystical dimension. Ray’s lengthy introduction doesn’t give much clue as to why he and his father didn’t get on. Ray’s ‘we had to find other things to fight about’ comes as a surprise because up that point, he has said only that, after his mother died, ‘I suppose Dad did the best he could’, and that father and son supported different New York baseball teams. It’s not clear why Ray feels sure the ‘he’ in the voice’s first mantra is Shoeless Joe – who appears in the cornfield before Ray turns it into a baseball field. Once that has happened, the seven other Black Sox also arrive and play baseball together: so why not ‘they will come’? Ray’s certainty that it’s Terence Mann’s pain that he must ease, also seems odd: it’s based entirely on Mann’s having once said that, as a boy, he dreamed of playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and naming a character in one of his stories John Kinsella.
In the film’s climax, a second team of 1920s baseball all-stars arrives for a game against Shoeless Joe et al. As usual, the Black Sox leave the field of play and disappear into elephant’s-eye-high ears of corn; Joe bids Terence Mann (James Earl Jones) to follow. Ray is miffed not to be invited, too, but Joe now reiterates ‘If you build it, he will come’ and looks in the direction of the catcher who’s not moved from his playing position. The latter removes his mask, and Ray realises it’s his father (Dwier Brown) as a young man: ‘he’ was John Kinsella all along. Unlike Ray, most viewers will already have assumed that – for no better reason than that the bad blood between son and father, though barely explained at the start, emerges as central to Ray’s rueful feelings about his life. He eventually admits to Terence Mann that, at the age of fourteen, he stopped playing catch with his father because John’s favourite player was Shoeless Joe. Ray, who must have been precociously pompous, told his father that he ‘could never respect a man whose hero was a criminal’[1]. (By the way, you’d never guess from Ray’s reaction to the revenant Joe that he once held this view.) Ray tells Mann that his biggest regret is not reconciling with his father: in other words, nothing less than that will do for the film to deliver the happy ending that’s clearly inevitable.
Phil Alden Robinson operates a production line of amazing coincidences and time travel. On the night before he sets off in search of Terence Mann, Ray and Annie have the same dream, that Ray and Mann are watching a baseball game together at Fenway Park, Boston. So Boston is where Ray heads, and he quickly finds the disenchanted Mann, though persuading him to come to the ball game takes somewhat longer. During the game, Ray hears the voice, now urging him to ‘go the distance’ and sees statistics on the Fenway Park scoreboard for someone called Archie Graham, who it transpires played in one game for the New York Giants in 1922 but never got to bat. Next stop for Ray, with Terence Mann in the passenger seat of his car, is Chisholm, Minnesota where Archie Graham became a much-respected doctor and died in 1972; next moment, Ray is back in 1972 to meet him. Infinitely benign Graham (Burt Lancaster) says that medicine, not baseball, was his vocation and declines Ray’s invitation to visit his cornfield-ballpark. Driving back to Iowa, Ray and Mann pick up a young hitchhiker – name of Archie Graham, eager to play in a baseball team. Back home, Ray gets into an argument with Annie’s brother, Mark (Timothy Busfield), who begs him to sell the farm to avoid the bank’s foreclosing on him. During the game in Ray’s field in which Archie Graham plays alongside Shoeless Joe, there’s a scuffle between Ray and Mark. This results in little Karin falling from the ballpark bleachers. Her parents are frantic until young Archie Graham heads in their direction, metamorphosing into elderly Dr Graham on the way. He examines the unconscious child and removes a piece of undigested hot dog (traditional ball game fare) from her throat, after which Karin is fine. There’s a price to pay: once Graham has left the field of play, he can never return to it. But as the old man is about to disappear into the corn, Joe Jackson calls out, ‘Hey, rookie – you were good!’ and Archie Graham’s eyes sparkle with grateful tears.
You might not mind all this so much if Field of Dreams was primarily a children’s picture, but although plenty of kids must have seen it (the film had a PG certificate), it isn’t that. And although it seems to share a key message with the great Mary Poppins (1964) – be a child at heart, and you’ll open yourself up to magic and joy – Phil Alden Robinson’s screenplay is remarkably slapdash in making the case. When he first hears the voice, Ray calls to Annie to ask if she heard it, and she didn’t. (You wonder how she could have, since she’s sitting on the farmhouse porch with Karin, not even in the cornfield, and the voice isn’t very loud.) But Annie, as a spirit of the Sixties counterculture, is a natural believer, and Karin really is a child; both soon see what Ray sees. Yet so can anyone else when it suits the storyline. Terence Mann may be disillusioned but, at the end of his visit with Ray to Fenway Park, Mann admits to hearing the voice and seeing Archie Graham’s stats on the scoreboard. Annie’s materialistic family can’t see Joe and his teammates; instead, earthbound Mark just goes on and on about mortgages and bankruptcy. Yet as Archie Graham exits the scene, Mark suddenly sees the players too and tells Ray he shouldn’t sell the farm after all. How come?
It is rather fitting, though, that, in this manipulative piece of hokum, the spiritually enlightened characters know as well as anyone what makes commercial sense. During Ray’s showdown with Mark, Karin argues that people will pay to watch ball games on the field of dreams, and Terence Mann backs her up: ‘People will come,’ he says, so that they can recover the innocence of childhood that baseball apparently symbolises. In the film’s closing shot, night has fallen over the field, but the floodlights are on, and a long procession of car headlights is making its way towards Ray’s farm. James Horner’s awful music, which has been twinkling in hopeful anticipation from a very early stage, can at last come to full inspirational bloom.
Kevin Costner, who appeared in this film just a year before his astonishingly successful Dances with Wolves, was always quite a boring actor, and that’s certainly the case here. Costner might have seemed a good choice for a man who’s ‘never done a crazy thing’ in thirty-six years; he’s badly miscast as a man receptive to the magical, or even as a man with evident humour. (To be fair to the filmmakers, the obvious choice to deliver in both those departments, Tom Hanks, was their first choice for Ray but turned the role down.) Costner is effective enough in a film like Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987) – as a decent, solid protagonist complemented by entertaining turns like Robert De Niro’s Al Capone and the characters played by Sean Connery and Andy Garcia. Something similar happens in the second half of Field of Dreams – in the first half, Amy Madigan, though likeable as spunky-sparky Annie, is required to do nearly all the heavy lifting – but only a bit similar. James Earl Jones and Burt Lancaster take the heat off Costner through the power of screen presence rather than the quality of their characterisations. In any case, Ray Kinsella isn’t meant to be unexcitingly dependable. He seems to resent his father, who worked for years on the New York docks, for being just that. John Kinsella, for his part, apparently took a dim view of his son’s zany student life, and presumably for failing to keep a steady job once he got out of Berkeley.
The source material, Canadian W P Kinsella’s 1982 novel Shoeless Joe, sounds unusual – a piece of fiction whose main character shares the novelist’s surname and with a key role in the narrative for a real, living writer: Shoeless Joe‘s equivalent of the film’s Terence Mann is J D Salinger[2]. It’s not only the dilution of those two elements, and opting for a less distinctive title, that gives writer-director Robinson’s film of the book a relatively familiar feel. Field of Dreams evokes a Hollywood tradition whose enduring exemplar is Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946): supernatural, extra-temporal intervention transforms life in the present and, for the individual living that life, redeems their past. Field of Dreams might seem bad PR for Heaven, the Christian concept of which is often disparaged as childish fantasy: Heaven, according to Ray’s father in the concluding conversation with his son, ‘is the place where dreams come true’. On the other hand, and despite its miracles, the film isn’t explicitly Christian, which would complicate things. There may be an implication that ‘Except ye … become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven’, but Robinson in effect takes his text from ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ from Disney’s Pinocchio (1940): ‘Anything your heart desires/Will come to you./If your heart is in your dream/No request is too extreme …’.
Field of Dreams is designed to appeal chiefly to male sentimentality: it’s a favourite, says Wikipedia, of former President George W Bush – ‘it made him cry because it reminded him of playing catch with his father’ (who was in the White House when the film was released). I suppose plenty of English kids can remember kicking a ball about or cricketing with their dad, and vice versa, but it’s not a primal image of boyhood/fatherhood, the way that playing baseball together evidently is (or, at least, used to be) in American families. The Natural opens with a father and son, a bat and ball; it closes with the son, now himself a father, carrying on the tradition with his own boychild. That’s how Field of Dreams ends, too, never mind the father has returned to life from who knows where. Kinsella Jr’s simple response to Kinsella Sr’s definition of Heaven is, ‘Hey Dad, you want to have a catch?’
26 July 2026
[1] A glance at Wikipedia’s account of the Black Sox scandal suggests that, more than a century on, the eight players’ guilt or innocence remains a matter of some dispute.
[2] Salinger was, as well as notoriously reclusive, notoriously litigious: according to the Wikipedia article on the novel, he ‘contacted ‘Kinsella’s publishers via his attorneys to express outrage over having been portrayed in Shoeless Joe and intimated he would sue should the character “J D Salinger” appear in any other medium, should Shoeless Joe be adapted …’.
