By Marc S. Sanders
Fantasy can be a real challenge. The audience must convincingly accept what could never possibly be real. The Wizard Of Oz from 1939 will always be the best of all fantasy films. The most visually significant element was bookending the film in black and white, with illuminating color in the center for the Land of Oz to come to life. You feel transported.
Phil Alden Robinson’s screen adaptation of W.P. Kinsella’s novel, Shoeless Joe, had a big challenge. The film became known as Field Of Dreams. How would any of us believe that an Iowa corn crop farmer hears voices and gets the inspiration to throw all common sense out the window and build a baseball field in the middle of his property? It’s absurd. Maybe only Kevin Costner, a modern-day innocent Jimmy Stewart of the time in the late 1980s, would convince any of us that this is something that needs to be accomplished. Robinson’s script offers no logic that any of this should be done. Re-watching the film, I was still skeptical of accepting the outrageousness. Then again this is Kevin Costner in his mid-thirties with a toothy grin on his face, chestnut hair, beat up jeans, and an adorable 8-year-old Gaby Hoffman for a daughter and a spitfire Amy Madigan for a wife. I can’t explain it any more than Ray can explain to his wife why he needs to tear down acres and acres of valuable crops for a baseball field that’ll run him into enormous debt. You just gotta roll with it, I guess, even if your suspension of disbelief isn’t there.
Thankfully, the authenticity of the fantasy welcomes itself as Field Of Dreams moves on.
Costner plays Ray Kinsella who had a very estranged relationship with his father who only briefly played in the minor leagues before aging quickly and working himself towards a premature death. Ray went on to Berkeley in the ‘60s and got caught up in the hippie movement leaving his father’s baseball heroes of Ty Cobb, Rusty Miller and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson behind.
After Ray builds the beautiful field and waits months and months for something, anything, to happen, the ghost of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, (Ray Liotta) donned in his White Sox uniform, appears. Jackson was part of the infamous Black Sox scandal and was denied of ever playing professional baseball again, following being caught accepting bribes to fix games with seven other teammates. Ray spends the evening with Joe pitching and fielding together. Now, whatever hasn’t made sense to the viewer suddenly presents some light on this outrageous feat we’ve been witnessing. Dorothy has met the Scarecrow.
Ray has dreams to find a recluse author named Terance Mann (a superb James Earl Jones who should’ve gotten an Oscar nomination; just an astonishing actor). Later, he meets a ball player who only played one inning in the major leagues, Archie “Moonlight” Graham – portrayed charmingly by an elderly Burt Lancaster and a spry Frank Whaley. How they both play the role is a surprise I’ll withhold from this write up.
I share this summary because Field Of Dreams improves itself as it progresses. The ghosts, the fantasy, and the sheer nerve that Robinson (director and writer) grants to Costner and the cast send you into the imaginary. You’ll be twenty minutes into the picture and ready to give up. Thankfully, the storyteller who made the film introduces something unworldly that encourages us to learn more and more. That’s what happens every time you watch The Wizard Of Oz. Not just the color, but the décor and strangely adorable munchkins draw you in with curiosity and you want to discover more about this place you’ve never visited before.
With Field Of Dreams, you don’t have to know anything about baseball. What you need to understand is that people of a past enter Ray’s life when he never expected them. Now, he’s destined to aid them in fulfilling what they were denied of during a time gone by.
We all wish to take advantage of our dreams gone by. Fantasy makes that possible.
Perhaps Ray Kinsella was denied an experience, as well. You’ll have to watch Field Of Dreams to find out.
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 