Field of Dreams

When Iowa farmer Ray hears a mysterious voice one night in his cornfield saying "If you build it, he will come," he feels the need to act. Despite taunts of lunacy, Ray builds a baseball diamond on his land, supported by his wife, Annie. Afterward, the ghosts of great players start emerging from the crops to play ball, led by "Shoeless" Joe Jackson. But, as Ray learns, this field of dreams is about much more than bringing former baseball greats out to play.

Review from The Guardian

I first saw Field of Dreams on 25 December 1993, on ITV. My father had died on 11 January 1992. If you want to, you can stop reading now, because you don’t have to be a psychologist to work out why Field of Dreams made me cry. I was 22 when Dad died, he was 52. I was six months out of university, living at home, and I’d just started working as a journalist. We hadn’t had a chance to get to know each other as adults, and, because of his shyness and quietness, I’d never really developed the sense of him as a person in his own right: he was just Dad, the person who went to work to pay the mortgage, then came home to listen to his records and read and reread and rereread his Trollope novels.

We both loved football, we were both passionate about music, but we were at our closest, probably, over film. In those far-off days when films took years to come to TV, and the Christmas schedules would be full of stuff the terrestrial channels had saved up to premiere – like Field of Dreams in 1993 – as well as seasons of the great directors and actors, he and I would watch the best films on TV together. He got me watching Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola and Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut. He let me develop the space to have my opinions about films – he scoffed at my conviction that Heaven’s Gate, in its long form, was one of the best films ever made, but he liked the fact that at least I had the conviction, I think. I don’t know: this was all a long time ago, and memory plays tricks, not least when it comes to defining one’s relationship to one’s family.

What I am certain of is that he would have dismissed Field of Dreams, as did so many critics when it was released in 1989. In the New Yorker, Pauline Kael swatted it aside as “a crock … the opening salute of the Bush era”; Time called it “the male weepie at its wussiest”; the Nation said “it gives wish fulfilment a bad name”. Field of Dreams, I can’t deny, is trite and sentimental; it’s deeply conservative, not just in its conception of a heartland America, but also in its vision of the innocence of the past (the ghostly baseball players who materialise from the 1980s corn, the disgraced Chicago White Sox of 1919, are themselves trying to return to a prelapsarian state). And – in the most materialistic way imaginable for a film that’s ostensibly spiritual – it has the crass message that there’s always money to be made from following your dream. But that first time I saw it, sitting on my mum’s sofa, it made me weep.

Read the rest of the review from Michael Hann here...