While its contemporary cachet has diminished, there was a time when Field of Dreams was an omnipresent cultural object, the subject of countless references and primitive, pre-Internet memes, mostly arrayed around its most famous line (“if you build it, he will come”). Growing up as a baseball fan in the ‘90s, the film was a touchstone, yet its content also seemed adult enough to keep it out of my immediate focus, especially during a period flush with movies (Rookie of the Year, Angels in the Outfield, The Sandlot, Little Big League, etc.) aimed at reconfiguring America’s pastime for a pre-teen audience. Only in my senior year of high school, after some classmates were assigned W.P. Kinsella’s source novel Shoeless Joe, did I become aware that part of the plot hinges on the protagonist kidnapping J.D. Salinger, in order to kick off Phase 2 of his Ghost Baseball master plan. Little did I know that this was only the tip of the iceberg.
Nearly 35 years after its initial release, I finally caught up with Field of Dreams in an ideal setting, wedged into a snug seat in economy class, next to a very squirmy 12-year-old losing it over his first viewing of 50 First Dates. Watching on a tiny screen, surrounded by the gentle glow of other tiny screens doling out similarly soft-serve fare, provided the perfect context for a grand cinematic gesture that now survives only as a fondly-remembered oddity, a relic of a different, more hopeful era. I will not say that the America of 1989 was more or less delusional than the one we have now, but its delusions now seem quaint, almost antique by comparison. Wedged between the curdled promise of the ‘60s and the latent, aimless anxiety of the ‘90s, it plays like the definitive white male Boomer movie, elevating the concerns of that privileged class to the standing of pure hack poetry.
Helmed by Phil Alden Robinson, who’d go on to direct the similarly rich Boomer text Sneakers a few years later, Field of Dreams is admittedly pretty awful. Yet the specific tenor of awfulness it manages to strike, the fanciful distillation of soft-focus guilt and boundless possibility, was so fascinating that it stuck with me for days afterward. The movie does not feature Salinger, who threatened a lawsuit, but instead James Earl Jones as the anonymized Terence Mann, who’s modified into a retired agitator and author now living in seclusion in a Jewish section of Boston. That a mostly non-political fiction writer has been upgraded for the screen into a distinctly authoritative-voiced veteran of the Civil Rights movement adds a further element of weirdness to what had formerly just been a gonzo beach read, aiming for an inadvisable level of dramatic significance.
The racial and radicalist motifs don’t fit neatly into Field of Dreams, but they are key to the whole bizarre enterprise, forming the backbone of a movie so desperate for gravity that it abandons any real development of its plot, characters, or setting. In this context, the insertion of a character who comes off as a Black Panther version of Bob Dylan feels perfect for a film that represents American magical realism in its purest form, the cutting political commentary and syncretic mysticism of the original South American cultivar transformed into something incoherent and brazenly sentimental. As conveyed in a snappy opening run-through, Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) is a Brooklyn boy who somehow ends up owning a farm in Iowa, accompanied by his brassy country-girl wife Annie (Amy Madigan) and daughter Karin (Gaby Hoffmann), immured amid an endless field of corn. Running headlong into a mid-life crisis, he falls into the thrall of a mysterious, disembodied voice (that of Madigan’s uncredited husband Ed Harris, if rumors are correct), which elliptically orders him to construct a full-scale baseball diamond in the middle of all that corn.
He of course complies, and this leap of faith is naturally rewarded by the phantasmal reappearance of the 1919 Black Sox squad, the Chicago team famous for earning lifetime bans from the sport after a gambler-backed plot to throw the World Series. Led by the supposedly innocent Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta, his usual smoldering menace doused down to a bemused twinkle in the eye), the squad runs drills and plays catch, captured against a dusky, idealized Midwestern backdrop, before disappearing back into the corn each night. The cultural ubiquity of this insane plot development has softened its freaky impact, but I was not prepared for the lax, low-stakes nature of the movie’s meandering shaggy dog storyline, which never rises to the level of the fantastic elements introduced. There’s a subplot about Ray potentially losing the farm, thanks to the operating costs of running a Minor League-level operation in the middle of his cash crop, and also the fact that no one beyond his immediate family can see the ghost players, which casts him somewhere between a total pariah and a bemusedly tolerated prophet without a cause to champion. Beyond this, there’s so much strange stuff crammed in that it never seems even momentarily plausible that a real conflict will arise.
After building it and watching them come, the next leg of Ray’s journey involves jumping into a heretofore-unseen vintage VW bus (peace sign sticker still affixed to the windshield) and capturing Mann, who’s somehow key to the whole puzzle. It’s at this point that the film’s intent at least becomes clear, as a frantic, wide-eyed attempt to reconfigure the political failures of the ‘60s and ‘70s by beating a full-scale retreat into esoteric nostalgia. The only thing grounding all this madness is Costner’s sturdy screen presence, variations on which would anchor a series of high-concept dramas throughout the ‘90s, to varying degrees of success. Yet even this straight backed bearing, with its appealing mix of the conservative and the carefree, starts to wane in power as time travel enters the equation. This occurs as Ray and Terence (now converted by the influence of the ghost players, whom he too can see) embark on their own quest, seeking out prior incarnations of a deceased small-town doctor (Burt Lancaster) who never had a chance to make good on his dreams, adding even more incident to an already overstuffed, under-conceived plot.
Robinson’s script wants this third act development to function in lieu of Ray’s conflict with his own dead father, a one-time minor-leaguer who has now too been resurrected into heartland baseball Valhalla. Instead, all this just scans as pure bathetic bunkum, culminating in a conclusion that sprinkles even more fairy dust on the remaining unresolved plot threads. That all the actors are convincing, and the movie as a whole is beautiful-looking (even on a ten inch screen), and generally well-directed only adds to the disjunction around its massive shortcomings. It’s easy to forget that a movie so bad could ever look, and feel, this good on the surface. This is a film that nowadays would appear as a piece of cheaply-made, disposable content on a third-rate streamer, be either ignored or threshed apart by the hourly news cycle, and be completely forgotten within a week. In 1989 it instead had the space to capture something ineffable in the national psyche, and so even now lingers in the cultural consciousness, if only in vague, vaporous form. Things have changed, but the general air of delusional grandiosity so perfectly captured here, that distinct American cocktail of hope, optimism and shame, has lived on.
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