Field of Dreams (1989)

This is a sweet and heartfelt movie.  I usually prefer movies anchored in reality, but the mystical aspect is perfect and I was swept away with it right through the wonderfully satisfying end.  Kevin Costner is at his  “everyman” best and has a great supporting cast.  There are beautiful moments of human connection and the ache of loss and longing and regret . It is poignant and uplighting and everything in between.  This movie isn’t just about baseball!

The farmer is standing in the middle of a cornfield when he hears the voice for the first time: “If you build it, he will come.” He looks around and doesn’t see anybody. The voice speaks again, soft and confidential: “If you build it, he will come.” Sometimes you can get too much sun, out there in a hot Iowa cornfield in the middle of the season. But this isn’t a case of sunstroke.
Up until the farmer starts hearing voices, “Field of Dreams” is a completely sensible film about a young couple who want to run a family farm in Iowa. Ray and Annie Kinsella have tested the fast track and had enough of it, and they enjoy sitting on the porch and listening to the grass grow. When the voice speaks for the first time, the farmer is baffled, and so was I: Could this be one of those religious pictures where a voice tells the humble farmer where to build the cathedral?
It’s a religious picture, all right, but the religion is baseball. And when he doesn’t understand the spoken message, Ray is granted a vision of a baseball diamond, right there in his cornfield.
If he builds it, the voice seems to promise, Joe Jackson will come and play on it – Shoeless Joe, who was a member of the infamous 1919 Black Sox team but protested until the day he died that he played the best he could.
As “Field of Dreams” developed this fantasy, I found myself being willingly drawn into it. Movies are often so timid these days, so afraid to take flights of the imagination, that there is something grand and brave about a movie where a voice tells a farmer to build a baseball diamond so that Shoeless Joe Jackson can materialize out of the cornfield and hit a few fly balls.
It is important not to tell too much about the plot. (I’m grateful I knew nothing about the movie when I went to see it, but the ads give away the Shoeless Joe angle.) Let it be said that Annie supports her husband’s vision, and that he finds it necessary to travel east to Boston so that he can enlist the support of a famous writer who has disappeared from public sight, and north to Minnesota to talk to what remains of a doctor who never got the chance to play with the pros.
The movie sensibly never tries to make the slightest explanation for the strange events that happen after the diamond is constructed.
There is, of course, the usual business about how the bank thinks the farmer has gone haywire and wants to foreclose on his mortgage (the Capra and Stewart movies always had evil bankers in them). But there is not a corny, stupid payoff at the end. Instead, the movie depends on a poetic vision to make its point.

There is a speech in this movie about baseball that is so simple and true that it is heartbreaking. And the whole attitude toward the players reflects that attitude. Why do they come back from the great beyond and play in this cornfield? Not to make any kind of vast, earthshattering statement, but simply to hit a few and field a few, and remind us of a good and innocent time.
It is very tricky to act in a movie like this; there is always the danger of seeming ridiculous. Costner and Madigan create such a grounded, believable married couple that one of the themes of the movie is the way love means sharing your loved one’s dreams. Jones and Lancaster create small, sharp character portraits – two older men who have taken the paths life offered them, but never forgotten what baseball represented to them in their youth. 
In the end, this is a beautiful story about a father and son.  I won't give away the ending, but it is nicely done.