Reframe: Field of Dreams

In the late spring of 1989, my best friend Barry and I walked into Ready Theater in the small town of Niles, Michigan to see a movie called Field of Dreams. We were (and remain) baseball evangelists, and since we both loved Costner in Bull Durham the year before (think of that—an actor making two baseball movies in a row), it felt like easy money when we turned over some of our hard-earned to sit in the Ready’s uncomfortable seats with sticky armrests to take in Costner’s latest movie about America’s pastime.

Now, you have to understand, Barry and I both have biological father issues. One of us has never met our biological father, and the other probably sometimes wishes he hadn’t. As you can imagine, we were easy marks for a film that ends with a father and son reunion. And so, as the credits rolled, we both caught a glimpse of each other covering our faces so that the other wouldn’t see the streams running from our eyes. 

Field of Dreams has to be one of the strangest films of the last thirty-plus years. Can you even imagine the pitch meeting with the studio? An overmatched farmer named Ray Kinsella walks through his cornfield and hears a voice saying “If you build it, he will come.” Then he sees a vision of a major league sized baseball field covering over a sizable portion of his corn crop. He then decides to build that field and his wife Annie (the ever-feisty Amy Madigan) goes along with his madcap idea without putting up a fight, even though it could lead to their financial ruin by depleting their crop output. 

It sounds ridiculous right on its face. But the reason why we go along with this madness is because Costner and Madigan seem to so strongly believe in what’s happening that we do too—without asking questions of logic or shaking our heads thinking, “who would do this?” The answer is almost no one would… except for these two. And that’s all we need.

So begins Ray’s quest to figure out what the voice means, and who the “he” is that will come. First, it appears to be Shoeless Joe Jackson, Ray’s father’s hero and an expelled (wrongly, by many accounts) member of the 1919 Chicago White Sox—eight of whom were forced from the game due to taking money to throw the World Series that year against the Cincinnati Reds. It never made sense in Jackson’s case, though. While he did take the money, he was easily the best player of the series. If anything, it seems likely that Jackson played the fixers while playing his ass off on the field.

Therefore, when Shoeless Joe walks out of the cornfield and into the outfield (in the form of a commanding Ray Liotta) Kinsella thinks he knows the “he” the field was built for. But Jackson is more of a catalyst—maybe even a messenger. He is not the “he.”

To make matters more confusing for Ray, another voice comes to him. “Ease his pain” it says. Through a shared dream, Annie and Ray deduce that the “he” might be Terence Mann (the wondrous James Earl Jones), a Baldwinesque author turned recluse on a JD Salinger scale, living in a dusty walkup apartment in Boston in-between storefronts with chickens hanging in the window. His connection to baseball and the field at first seems tenuous, but there are revelations to come. 

Ray talks the great writer into going with him to a game at Fenway park where they both see a message on the scoreboard about a baseball player named Archibald “Moonlight” Graham who once played a half inning in the major leagues many years ago (of note: there really was a “Moonlight” Graham whose baseball career was that short). Ray and Terence then head to Minnesota to find Graham, who they discover was a great doctor and philanthropist who always carried an umbrella, but is many years deceased. 

As Ray leaves Terence to make a phone call to his worried father who hasn’t been able to reach him (a wonderful minor scene where Terence picks up the phone, starts to dial, pauses and then chuckles and says, “What do I tell him?”), Ray enters into a sort of time machine. The marquee on the theater reads The Godfather. The license plate tags on a car say 1972. A man walks by in the distance… carrying an umbrella. It is “Moonlight” Graham (played by—in a master stroke of casting—Burt Lancaster). 

Ray and the good doctor meet, and Graham explains how he just once wanted to come to bat in the big leagues and give the pitcher a wink while he was in his wind-up (to make him think “I know something he doesn’t”). Ray empathizes with the loss of that dream, but the kindly doctor sees his short-lived career as no tragedy. “Had I never become a doctor, that would be a tragedy.”

Ray leaves Doctor Graham and he and Terence return to the road and back to Iowa where the threat of foreclosure awaits. On their way Ray picks up a hitchhiker in the hopes of building some good karma. The young man says he plays ball, and introduces himself as Archie Graham. Upon their return home, they find that Shoeless Joe and his seven suspended White Sox teammates have asked some other players to come out of the cornfield so they could play full games (except for Ty Cobb, who as Joe amusingly points out, “None of us could stand the sonuvabitch while he was alive, so we told him to stick it!”). Archie joins them. 

Annie’s brother (Timothy Busfield of Thirtysomething fame) greets them with an offer of purchase to try to save the Kinsellas from bankruptcy. In the resulting argument, the Kinsellas’ young daughter falls from the stands along the first base side of the infield with a piece of a hot dog lodged in her throat. Archie springs into action, and, as he steps over the white chalked line, he becomes Doctor Graham—leaving his youth behind. With a couple of sharp pats to the back the child is saved, and Annie’s brother says, “When did these players get here?,” while insisting now that they mustn’t sell the farm, despite the impending financial doom.

This leads up to one of the great monologues in the history of cinema. Mann stands up and explains how baseball has been the one constant in American life—baseball has “marked the time”—and how people will come to Iowa, drive down Ray’s dirt road, and pass home-saving money over to him without even thinking about it, just to recapture a bit of their youth and innocence while watching some ghosts play ball.

It is truly magnificent. James Earl Jones has enjoyed a storied career, but I dare say it’s his finest moment on screen. In the mouth of almost anyone else, his speech could have been saccharine and corny. But coming from that deep voice of authority that no one else has ever possessed—it sounds like gospel. 

The film’s central question is still unanswered at this point: Who is the “he” that will come? As Shoeless Joe and the other players head out into the cornfield (taking an ever curious Terence Mann with them, who promises Ray that he will write about what he discovers out there), one player is left behind. As the catcher removes his gear, Ray recognizes him. 

It’s the man who taught him how to play baseball, but also infuriated him by pushing him so hard that playing became like eating vegetables. He’s the man whose home he left at age seventeen after harsh words—words he never got to take back before the man passed. The man behind the catcher’s mask is, of course, Ray’s father, John Kinsella. A man that Ray grieved over not because of the relationship they had, but for the one they didn’t have. 

After a sweetly awkward reunion John begins walking away when Ray calls out, “Hey, dad, do you wanna have a catch?” The camera then pulls away as father and son throw the ball back and forth. The scene widens out even further, and we see cars driving through the night—to Ray’s house.

“Oh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.”

Many years ago, I recall a critic for USA Today by the name of Mike Clark, who liked the movie well enough, but opined that he has never met anyone who could tell him what it was about. I always found his confusion strange. Joe Jackson gets to play ball again. Archie gets that one at bat. Terence rediscovers his writerly soul. And Ray gets to play catch with his dad. It’s so obvious that it almost feels silly to say, but Field of Dreams is about the thing that all of us, at one time or another, wish we could have:

A second chance.

The great sports writer Howard Bryant once said to me, “At their best, movies make up for what we don’t have.”

Field of Dreams is the perfect case in point. It’s a miracle of a movie, really. I’ve often heard filmmakers say that nothing is harder than comedy, but I would politely disagree—I think the hardest film to make is the fable, especially one as gentle as this. It’s always been a mystery to me why director Phil Alden Robinson made so few movies after Field of Dreams. He clearly knew how to operate at the highest level of difficulty. 

Exactly six years ago, at the very moment I am writing these words, I made the sojourn to Dyersville, Iowa to see this field that had cinematically moved me so. I was at a particularly low point in my life when Barry and I, along with our mutual friend Tom, decided to take a baseball trip—six days of driving around middle America, visiting multiple cities and stadiums to take in their atmosphere, and of course, the games.

Before we made it to a single stadium, we stopped in Iowa first. We drove past cornfield after cornfield on country roads where cell service was spotty at best but windmills were plentiful. We drove down the long dirt drive to the Kinsella home and over a short bridge with a babbling brook coursing away beneath. We saw the Kinsella farmhouse straight away and the big red barn to its right. To the left was the field. 

You could be forgiven for being a little underwhelmed at first. It’s just a modest field surrounded by corn after all. But something starts to happen the longer you are there—as you’re playing catch with your oldest friend, throwing the ball from the pitcher’s mound where Ray tried to get a curveball past Shoeless Joe, or when you sit on the bench James Earl Jones rose up from and gave that magnificent speech. 

It’s magic, really. To paraphrase Jones, the memories are so thick you practically have to brush them away from your face. 

Early in the film, when Shoeless Joe first appears, he stops and wonders aloud to Ray where he is as he runs toward the cornfield.

“Hey! Is this heaven?” Joe asks..

“No,” Ray replies, “It’s Iowa.”

As I stood there by that bench, looking out onto that field with its outfield wall made of corn stalks, I remember thinking: if this isn’t heaven, well, you could have fooled me.