Charlotte Wilder's 'Field of Dreams' review: Corny, confusing and ... deeply emotional
By Charlotte Wilder
FOX Sports Columnist
On Thursday, the Chicago White Sox and the New York Yankees will meet in a cornfield in Iowa.
It’s a very famous cornfield. In fact, it’s the most famous cornfield in this country because this cornfield once belonged to Kevin Costner’s character, Ray, in the movie "Field Of Dreams."
And it now belongs to people in America who care deeply about baseball.
I care deeply about baseball, but until this weekend, I had never seen this movie. It came out in 1989, the year I was born, which I could try to use as an excuse. But the thing about movies is that once they’re made, you can watch them anytime. So the truth is that I didn’t watch it because everyone I grew up with loved it, and I'm a contrarian — and also because I was obsessed with "Angels In The Outfield" and had no interest in watching a different baseball movie with themes about heaven.
But since the network I work for is airing the special game this week (6 p.m. ET Thursday on FOX), it seemed like a good time to watch the film. So if you’ve seen it before and want a refresh or if you’ve never seen it and don’t have time to check it out before Thursday: Please, come right this way.
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The film opens on a montage of old photos with the twinkly, sentimental piano music that accompanied every movie from the late ‘80s and early ’90s (think "Mrs. Doubtfire" when Robin Williams is alone with the toy dinosaurs in that film studio). Ray Kinsella (Costner) voices over the story of his father’s life.
John Kinsella, we gather, loved baseball — the Yankees specifically — but couldn’t make it as a player. He fought in World War I and then settled into life as a blue-collar worker. He never amounted to much in Ray’s eyes, so Ray left home determined to be more than his old man. He went to Berkeley, where his major was "officially English, but really, it was the Sixties." Read: He smoked a lot of pot.
Ray met his wife, Annie, in college. Annie is from Iowa. They got married and had a kid named Karin, and at the age of 36, Ray bought a farm. I am unclear on how Ray bought a farm because he didn’t seem to have a job or money before that, but we meet our hero when he’s walking aimlessly through his cornfields, so somehow he did it.
This is where things get interesting. Ray hears a voice that says: "If you build it, he will come." I didn’t know that famous line was from "Field of Dreams." I thought it was an old Roman saying. But then I realized that I was thinking of "Rome wasn’t built in a day."
I’m going to be honest: From here on out, I had very little idea as to what was happening in the movie. The basic gist is that Ray hears this voice telling him to build a baseball field, SO HE DOES. He’s scared of never being spontaneous and thinks that if he doesn’t act now, he’ll end up being boring like his dad. I want to tell Ray that 36 isn’t that old and that he has a few years before he needs to kick into midlife crisis mode, but maybe 36 was older in the '80s than it is now.
Ray’s wife is strangely supportive of her husband’s blind drive to follow this voice, even if it means using all their savings to install massive floodlights and mowing down enough of their corn crop that they can no longer break even. They end up owing their house to the bank and also Annie’s brother, Mark, who seems to be in business with the bank guys.
This, however, doesn’t stop Ray from chasing his dreams, even though he doesn’t know what his dreams are. That's because Shoeless Joe Jackson and the whole 1919 Black Sox team show up to the field. They are ghosts, I’m pretty sure, but Ray, Annie and Karin can see them. Annie’s brother and mom can’t, though, so they tell Ray he’s nuts.
The movie gets even wackier when Annie delivers an impassioned speech against censorship at a PTA meeting. Some very proper-looking lady who seems to have wandered into this movie from "Footloose" is trying to ban a book in the Iowa public schools. The author is a guy named Terence Mann (no, not the current NBA player), played by James Earl Jones. We find out that Mann was a hippie/activist/the guy who coined the phrase "Make love, not war," but he has since given up hope for humanity and become a computer programmer in Boston (???).
Annie calls the woman arguing against Mann’s book a "Nazi cow" and a "book burner" and tells the woman that she didn’t experience the Sixties but "had two Fifties and moved right into the Seventies."
The woman is like, "Well, your husband plowed under his corn and built a baseball field, the weirdo!"
You gotta admit, she has a point.
Annie wins the argument when she gets everyone in the audience to raise their hands and basically denounce communism (once again: ???). But Ray isn’t really listening to his wife during her moment of patriotic, first-amendment glory. Instead, he’s listening to the voice, which is now telling him that he has to take Mann to a baseball game because Mann once wrote a story with a character named John Kinsella, Ray’s father’s name.
So Ray goes to Boston and kind of kidnaps James Earl Jones, a.k.a. Terence Mann, at fake gunpoint. The Mann storyline is interesting — he is sick of feeling like the world thinks he owes it something. He doesn’t want to be a figurehead for peace and love anymore because he doesn’t believe in them. But Kevin Costner won’t leave his apartment, so Mann is like, fine! I’ll go to Fenway with you, you lunatic.
As someone who grew up going to school right next to Fenway Park and loves that ballpark more than anything else in sports, I was quite pleased with this turn of events, even if I was completely clueless as to why they were happening. Fun fact: According to Wikipedia, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon were extras in this scene. Doesn’t get more Boston than that, kid!
From there, Ray and Mann drive to Minnesota to find an old ballplayer, but it turns out that ballplayer is dead. So they time travel and discover that this ballplayer played only one inning in the major leagues and then became a doctor. (Meanwhile, back in Iowa, Annie has causally lost the house to the bank, even though neither she nor Ray seems particularly worried about that.) Ray and Mann go back to Iowa, and on the way, they pick up a hitchhiker, who — you guessed it! — turns out to be a young version of the dead doctor they just met when they traveled back in time.
The guys get home. Shoeless Joe and his buddies are all playing a game on the field when Annie’s brother comes to seize the farm. But Ray and Annie’s daughter, Karin, who must be around 6, is like, "Don’t sell the farm. People will pay to come to this baseball field" (though it’s unclear if the general public will be able to see the ghosts).
Mark gets angry and basically pushes the child off the bleachers, which doesn’t get nearly enough attention after the fact. Karin is lying on the ground, seemingly lifeless, when the young-man version of the dead doctor steps off the field, turns into an old man and saves Karin’s life. Mark watches this happen and suddenly believes Ray, so he tells them to keep the house (even though that’s not how banks or mortgages work).
Then Mann — who seems to once again believe in peace and love, thanks to time travel and sports — delivers an impassioned speech.
"The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball," he says.
This is hands-down the sappiest speech I have ever heard in a movie, but for some reason, I start tearing up. I begin to cry harder when Ray realizes that his dead father is the catcher — but as a young man, before "life wore him down." Ray also realizes that "If you build it, he will come" was always referring to his dad, so he finally understands his father and asks him to "have a catch." The movie ends with a bunch of cars driving up to pay Ray to look at the field.
As the credits roll, I’m completely confused and very emotional.
Look, I can’t tell you how this movie logically goes from A to Z, but I can tell you that Z is "feeling some type of way about your family, baseball and nostalgia." In other words, Z is the whole point. The journey to get there is enjoyable, and it doesn’t really matter what turns it takes.
Which is exactly like baseball itself. You don’t have to understand the game’s intricacies or even pay attention the whole time you’re watching, as long as you know the end result and understand why the game matters.
I’ve often said that going to a baseball game is a religious experience. There is something hallowed about sitting in a ballpark on a summer evening with a hot dog. Time slows down, your practical worries fade away, and you fall into the rhythm of sounds: the bat cracking, the ball thudding into a glove, the people cheering, the ushers yelling about peanuts and beers you can buy. Baseball is about the build-up and release of tension. Action is not guaranteed, but feeling is.
I apologize that that paragraph is the corniest thing I’ve ever written, but a) I mean it and b) "Field of Dreams" is one of the corniest movies I’ve ever seen. Yet somehow, it carries itself with its own earnestness. The nostalgia of it — even things like Costner’s perfect '80s jeans and his wife’s high-waisted shorts that are once again fashionable in 2021 — is comforting, 32 years later.
If I had seen this as a kid, I don’t think I would have had any problem following the plot: It’s a fantastical adventure that children can accept. When you’re little, you don’t think twice about whether something could actually happen, and you don’t judge a man who hears a voice and decides to listen to it — even if it means ruining his livelihood in the process.
It is bold for what is basically a science fiction movie to exist in a world that isn’t magical. As an adult, it feels bold to succumb to something that doesn’t fully make sense. But the important thing is that you come away from it understanding that family matters and baseball matters because it can connect you to your family.
"Field Of Dreams" is a romantic movie about a romantic sport. The point isn’t to understand why the cars are lining up to see the dream field. It’s to trust — or at least hope — that if you were given the chance, you’d line up, too.
Charlotte Wilder is a general columnist and cohost of "The People's Sports Podcast" for FOX Sports. She's honored to represent the constantly neglected Boston area in sports media, loves talking to sports fans about their feelings and is happiest eating a hotdog in a ballpark or nachos in a stadium. Follow her on Twitter @TheWilderThings.
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