Overdue Movie Review: Field of Dreams (1989)
I think deep down I always knew I’d get found out. I probably could have predicted exactly how it would go down too.
A couple months ago my brother and I went to a minor league baseball game in Las Vegas. It was a typical night:
We were half watching the game, half trading obscure baseball references and random movie quotes.
I was looking out at the field when my brother said something about Moonlight Graham, and I sort of just kept gazing out distantly toward the game.
No head nod. No chuckle. Just a vacant stare.
He knew right away.
“Wait a second,” he said. “Have you never seen Field of Dreams?”
Uh oh. You got me.
I don’t know how it happened. But no, I had never seen Field of Dreams. And I don’t know why. I honestly can’t fathom a single reason.
Russ had a field day with this and shared his outrage on Twitter within seconds.
I’m an obsessive baseball fan. I have spent countless hours watching games, devoted probably thousands of others to baseball research and writing, and yet I hadn’t seen one of the most famous baseball movies of all time.
Field of Dreams is a Best Picture nominee, in the pantheon of all sports movies, let alone just baseball. And yet I hadn’t seen it.
I’d seen clips. I’d seen parodies from Pepsi commercials to Itchy and Scratchy episodes. I just hadn’t sat down to watch the whole thing.
How shameful is that? It’s pretty bad.
I want to be careful not to exaggerate here, but I’d estimate that I’ve seen Major League in its entirety somewhere between 15 and 25 times in my life. Not to mention the number of times I’ve caught parts of it on TV or actively sought out scenes on YouTube.
Hell, I’ve even read “Eight Men Out,” the book about those same Chicago Black Sox, which was written in 1963. Why I invested however many hours it took to read a book written 20+ years before I was born, but never got around to sitting through less than two hours of a Kevin Costner movie, is completely beyond me.
So if you’re judging me, I understand.
But while I’m airing it all out in the open, here are the two most damning facts about it:
1) In August 2009 I actually visited the cornfield in Dyersville, Iowa where they filmed Field of Dreams. I was traveling a lot for work that year, had to make a visit to Platteville, Wis., and stopped off at the site famous for the movie I’d never seen. I bought a t-shirt that said, “Is this heaven? No, it’s Iowa,” and wore it regularly for years. I wrote a blog post (since removed from my now-defunct old website) and just left out that tiny detail about never seeing it.
Russ brought this fact up immediately.
Just found out huge baseball fan @mitchgoldich has never seen all of Field of Dreams…. and he’s been to the park in Iowa! #lies
— Russ Goldich (@russgoldich) August 25, 2014
#lies #fraud #ashamed
2) I own Field of Dreams on DVD. I actually have for some time now. I don’t remember exactly when— it must have been after the trip to Dyersville— but at some point I saw it in a $5 bin and bought it, thinking, “You know I should really get around to watching Field of Dreams some time.” I stuck it in the back of a case with 100 other movies, schlepped it around as I moved in and out of half dozen apartments over the last few years, and completely forgot I had it until recently.
So which is more damning, that I drove to the movie site or that I’ve had it in my possession for years?
I don’t know. This all defies explanation.
Saturday I woke up and decided it was finally the day. Coping with four off days between the end of the League Championship Series and the start of the World Series, I filled the gap by finally watching Field of Dreams.
Here is my long overdue movie review:
*****
Field of Dreams is a movie about a schizophrenic farmer on a mission to complete a spiritual journey he knows will bankrupt his family.
OK, maybe I went into the movie a little too cynical. But I don’t really have to waste time talking about the plot because, again, everybody else on the planet has already seen it.
I think part of the reason I hadn’t gotten around to watching Field of Dreams was because I knew it was sappy and I was expecting it to be over-the-top hokey. That was probably the root cause of my cynicism. But I tried to go in with an open mind, and I was actually surprised how much I was drawn in by the opening two minutes, which outlined the dynamic between Costner and his father.
The plot of the movie is, by design, an exercise in absurdity. IMDB.com classifies it as both a drama and a fantasy.
It’s possible some of the magic was sucked out of my first viewing because I knew the movie ended with Costner playing catch on the field with his Dad. So the whole time he was trying to decipher what the voice meant and where it would lead him, the suspense had been killed for me.
It’s sort of like watching Star Wars for the first time even after you already know… well, I won’t spoil the plot twist for you guys.
But it’s hard to believe that ruins the movie. Because first, I know it’s considered one of those classics people watch many times over. And second, even if you don’t know the ending in advance, it’s probably not hard to figure out as it’s unraveling.
But you don’t watch Field of Dreams for the plot. You watch to be reminded what you love about baseball.
The movie plays very hard on the romanticism of the sport—the smells, the sounds, the way the old days were.
Now am I sucker for that kind of stuff? Yes, of course. I have a particular soft spot for the color the sky turns around the eighth or ninth inning of the Sunday afternoon games in August and September. It’s tied to years of having Sunday season tickets with a couple good friends, and some fond memories from that time of day— a few hours before sunset, when the sky isn’t quite blue anymore but isn’t quite orange yet.
So yes, I get it. The smell of the grass, and all that stuff.
But I also recognize that not everybody has those feelings. And I often read and think about the issues baseball faces (like the unending barrage of stories about the sport’s demise). Fewer kids play baseball and gain exposure to those romantic elements early enough to be hooked for life.
If baseball wants to grow, gain a new audience, remain popular with young people and get better TV ratings, it can’t depend entirely on the elements of the sport most drummed up in Field of Dreams.
But that’s an issue for another day, and certainly isn’t a knock against the movie.
So I finished the movie and didn’t quite know how to feel. Maybe I felt relieved more than anything, that I could finally say that I saw it. That I wouldn’t be on Jeopardy! someday, wager a true daily double because the category was baseball and then botch an easy question about Moonlight Graham, humiliating myself and losing thousands of dollars.
To be honest, I think I spent too much of the movie analyzing whether or not I was enjoying it. I was making notes of lines and scenes that stood out as either good or bad.
Then, toward the end, I got to the scene that hit home the most.
Costner was being lectured by his brother-in-law, who was both the villain and the most sensible voice of reason in the movie. He wanted to buy out the land and turn it back into a farm, even after Costner’s daughter came up with the idea to turn it into a tourist attraction.
Five years ago I drove a few hours out of my way to visit a baseball field in the middle of the nowhere from a movie I’d never seen. And then James Earl Jones explained why:
Let’s break it down.
Ray. People will come, Ray.
I did.
They’ll come to Iowa for reasons they can’t even fathom.
Also true.
They’ll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they’re doing it.
Yep.
They’ll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past.
Did I mention my visit was three months after graduating college, on my very first road trip of a job that would have me traveling full-time for nine months?
“Of course, we won’t mind if you look around,” you’ll say, “It’s only $20 per person.” They’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they’ll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes.
This is pretty close to what I did. The movie is starting to speak to me.
And they’ll watch the game and it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they’ll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s 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.
And then in that last part he really got on a roll. But to be honest, it felt a little over-the-top, which I said was my concern going in.
As much as I love baseball, I still found the romanticism a bit too much to take at times.
One of the central points of conflict was that Costner and his father had a falling out, which the audience is expected to understand was about something colossal. Toward the end you find out Costner ended their last great fight by telling his father he couldn’t respect a man whose hero was a cheater like Shoeless Joe Jackson. That seems… a bit overdramatic? Not worthy of being relationship ending?
Maybe that’s just me.
I enjoyed Field of Dreams, but I was probably never meant to love it. I think after all this time the expectations were too high and it could never have lived up to the hype. It doesn’t come close to knocking Major League or The Sandlot off their pedestal at the top of my favorite baseball movie list, and I’d put it behind a few others as well.
Not that you should care too much about my review. You’ve already seen the movie.