Field Of Dreams
Before Pete Rose destroyed his standing in the world of baseball for all time with his sports gambling debacle, there was the saga of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the rest of his Chicago Black Sox throwing the 1919 World Series reportedy after a payout from some illegal gambling organizations (with the identities of these men having never been fully revealed). Although Jackson was never personally proven to have ever attempted to throw the Series having had the best batting average of any player on either team, the only home run as well as the honor of having never been charged with an error the whole time (a sure sign that he was NOT in it to lose it), it must also be remembered that he was (like Rose) said to be almost borderline retarded in his intelligence level (he played baseball very well and little else) and was no doubt susceptible to being manipulated by his fellow teammates (all of whom were VERY aware of what they were doing) who coerced him into accepting money and putting it in his pocket without him ever agreeing to throw any game even as the others saw their actions as being justified revenge upon the cheapskate owner of the team who had welched on the agreed upon salaries that were to be paid to the players. Nonetheless, when the shit hit the fan, it was Jackson (as the team’s biggest star) who was front and center in the scandal sheets as he and the other seven players were all banned for life, never to return or in Jackson’s case, never to see The Hall Of Fame (for which his career stats alone made him more than worthy). With the release of 1988’s Eight Men Out and this film the following year, a mini movement started up (which continues to this day) demanding that Shoeless Joe somehow be reinstated and “forgiven” so that he might be ushered into the Hall Of Fame (a movement which the more recently banned Rose also tried to capitalize on for himself as well) but to this day, still nothing has come of it. While Eight Men Out was a straight up biographical film, this movie takes the Shoeless Joe story as the starting point for a more sweeping metaphor where we are told that baseball represents some kind of perfect element in our society to bring us closer to both God and Heaven. Somehow all of this works even if the good and positive feelings quickly dissipate within mere minutes of viewing. The film stars Kevin Costner (whose very name became alarmingly synonymous with the game of baseball due to this and some of his other movies at the time) as Ray Kinsella (sharing the same last name with the story’s original author, W.P. Kinsella), an Iowa farmer who one day hears a voice (God?) in his head (with the actor playing The Voice rumored to be either Ed Harris or Ray Liotta or Costner himself who has claimed it was him even though the filmmakers have never publicly stated who it actually was) telling him “If you build it, he will come.” That statement is pretty vague, but soon Costner experiences visions that tell him that “it” is a baseball field in his cornfield and that “he” is Shoeless Joe himself (Ray Liotta) looking to come back from the dead so that he and his fellow passed on players can have a place to play again. The interesting thing about the Shoeless Joe character here is that he is more like a herald, a harbinger of what is truly to come rather than just being some kind of end all, be all “Baseball God” coming back to do what he does best. The funny thing is that while Costner, his supportive wife (Amy Madigan) and sweet young daughter (Gaby Hoffmann) can all clearly see the ghostly ballplayers running around and playing their little hearts out, not everybody else can, including his smarmy brother in law (Timothy Busfield) who seems to work in the real estate foreclosure business himself and enjoys stridently telling his sister and her husband how plowing down their cornfield to build their baseball field has now diminished their property value and that they need to sell their farm off to him and his partners while they still can in order to recoup their massive losses. But Costner remains undaunted, following his visions to Boston to track down a legendary but reclusive 1960s counterculture writer whom he has been made to feel compelled to “ease his pain”. Now when W.P. Kinsella wrote his original novel (1982’s Shoeless Joe) that the film is based on, he actually wrote this character to be the REAL LIFE writer J.D. Salinger of Catcher In The Rye fame (who unlike Jackson, was very much alive at the time) and the fallout was brutal to say the least, with Salinger reportedly extremely offended at having had a fictional portrayal done of him and his lawyers personally threatening legal action if any adaptation of the book into a movie were done with his character intact. Thus, the character was rewritten into the fictional counterculture radical Terrance Mann and played by James Earl Jones, who not only brings a breath of fresh air to the film (or at least a second breath), he and Costner make everything into a pseudo buddy road movie, taking off to Minnesota to meet up with a beloved, saintly doctor (Burt Lancaster) who played very briefly in The Major Leagues and would have loved to have done just a little bit more. As the story continues into its second half, the notion of human goodness being a defining quality when it comes to being allowed to participate on The Field (a line about the notoriously hateful Ty Cobb not being allowed to come which also implies that he is in Hell comes to mind) along with the idea of redemption being achieved through the game itself brings forth a number of ideas, including 1) that dead people were clearly appearing and communicating with the living through this field (of which Shoeless Joe and his teammates were surely not the last), 2) as stated by Jones so profoundly in his monologue at the end (which is ironic since the actor is known to hate baseball in real life), all of this is happening because the game itself represents nothing less than purity so that like he, Costner, and his family, others will come and be awed by what lies in front of them, which is not just a mere game of baseball, but possibly a chance to reconnect with dead loved ones, and 3) besides the very heavily implied idea at the end that people everywhere will come to see this “gateway” or “portal” that The Field represents, it also means that there could very well be other “gateways” nationwide or even worldwide opening up (and not just in the form of a baseball field), thus creating a world where not only will the dead return to life, but also one where living human beings can duly “cross over” while still being alive, creating endless possibilities including actually communicating with God. In short, it would be nothing less than a benign, benevolent apocalypse, the official end of the world that turns out to be a happy ending after all, one where death no longer exists and thus is no longer to be feared as both ourselves and those who are no longer with us are always just a couple of steps away through the vortex in order to be reunited once again. The overpraising here of the (rather boring) game of baseball is indeed just a metaphor in and of itself for what the real revelations are here, with Liotta’s Shoeless Joe giving off the impression that he knows a heck of a lot more than he’s letting on to Costner and probably knowing the whole time exactly what is going on. Costner on the other hand, is a guy being made to risk it all by taking a leap of faith, learning to trust in his visions without questioning how or why he’s receiving them or in what grand reward he’s going to see out of it by the end of the day, making him appear to be a fool to his neighbors and in laws but as long as his wife (thankfully) stands by his side through all of this knowing that in the end his “crazy” actions will be justified. As far as this being a “Christian” film is concerned, that’s a little bit harder to fathom as the three lead characters are all shown to have some radical leanings which would appear to make them the ideal saints for a story like this, but yet it is that very comforting notion that the Armageddon that many have feared for a long time will not come in a sea of fire and brimstone or in a hail of nuclear missiles, but rather with just one ordinary man taking a chance on feelings granted to him by God (The Voice) to pursue what appears to be an insane quest and in doing so, manages to open up one (possibly the first worldwide) of these portals that will change the meaning of mankind’s existence and very purpose forever…
8/10