1989 was a vintage year for film - not quite the cinematic milestone as in 1939, 50 years before, but still pretty impressive - certainly with comparison to later decades where blockbusters have gradually taken over from the more thoughtful films. The likes of Dead Poets Society(qv), Parenthood, Born on the Fourth of July, Dead Calm, and the work of emerging talents like Steven Soderbergh (Sex Lies and Videotape) and Kenneth Branagh (with his new version of Henry V) came to the fore, and were as commercial and highly regarded in their day as the blockbusters; even the blockbusters themelves were pretty impressive and above average too, with the likes of Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade filling cinemas that notable summer.
The "sleeper" hit of the year meanwhile covered slightly more humdrum but richly emotional subtexts. Baseball had re-entered into Hollywood's consciousness in the late 80s, with John Sayles' (no relation) Eight Men Out, and Kevin Costner as a baseball coach in Bull Durham: the former covered the "Black Socks" baseball scandal of the early 1920's, where noted baseball stars took bribes to contrive to fix the World Series. One of these, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, was the subject of W.P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe, about the lost era of baseball heroes whose legacy was tarnished by the Black Socks scandal, but as ghosts of the past were longing for the geater love of baseball itself.
I was frustrated from seeing Field of Dreams throughout 1989 - British distribution of American films in those days was often protracted, or in the case of films with the potentially limited appeal of baseball, never at all (often straight to video as with the excellent The Babe.) General release in the UK came in the late autumn of 1989 and drifted over into the 1990s - where I was watching a professional snooker match at Wembley Conference Centre between Willie Thorne and Dennis Taylor: Thorne was 4 frames to 1 ahead, and with extra time likely to spare for me to squeeze in a bonus visit to a London cinema. Taylor came back however to level the scores to 4 frames all, only to himself let it slip at the last, and for Willie to win the match 5-4, that he could have sealed two hours before.
I managed to get those two hours back however, to see Phil Alden Robinson's fine film at the Ipswich Film Theatre a few months later - always the ideal venue for thought-provoking films.
Robinson had been striving to make a film of Shoeless Joe for some years, and in spite of involvement in another baseball film that year, Kevin Costner was eager and willing to play the film's ideal everyman hero Ray Kinsella, who hears a voice in his Iowa cornfield:
"If you build it, he will come."
Ray himself, the most pragmatic and unsensationalist of individuals (as a photo montage prologue explains), deduces from this mysterious voice that it is something to do with a childhood hero of his late father's, Shoeless Joe. The impact of the message is strong enough to will Ray to build a baseball diamond within his farm (the actual set has now become a tourist attraction), with the help of his understanding wife Annie (Amy Madigan) and their intuitive young daughter Karin (Gaby Hoffman). One indeterminate evening - long after the field has been completed, and Ray has patiently warded off local naysayers including his brother-in-law (Timothy Busfield) - out pops the figure of Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta).
As a fantasy, Robinson plays it commendably straight, and it is this very pragmatic approach, to make the film as a normal drama with an element of the mystical, that makes Field of Dreams so quietly compelling. Shoeless Joe is a lost soul, one of the many lost souls in the American public's eyes since the Black Socks scandal. He and others from the lost era also magically return to the field to take the chance to play their game once again.
Like Dead Poets Society, it is a film very much about idealism, but a more reflective, older idealism, less a field of dreams than of faded dreams. Many of the participants are idealists whose great moment passed them by, and they never really got their moment to shine.
It is not just for the dead, but also the living: Ray's voices reach out not only to distant baseball players, but their followers too. The essence of baseball, like with many sports, is as much about the fans as the players. One such is a distinguished writer, Thomas Mann (no connection with the German 20th century author of the same name), originally written in Kinsella's novel as John Steinbeck. Mann is, like Steinbeck, a reclusive individual since his heyday of the 1960s. In the imposing but wholesome presence of James Earl Jones, he is also rather embittered for it, a civil rights activist and philosopher from an era in a society that no longer cherishes his ideals. He is in avery way, a lost soul as much as the baseball players that he secretly admires from way back.
But he is also their chorus as well as their audience. The manner in which Jones's character is initially skeptical and even hostile to Ray's idealism then later won over through shared experience, is one of the most compelling characterisations of the film. Especially intriguing is the character's coda, where Shoeless Joe invites Mann himself back into the field. Ray, however, is not invited. It is one of the most benevolent and intriguing "death" scenes ever filmed.
Ray is resentful of being excluded from the field, but there are of course, excellent reasons for this. It is he who has first experienced the voices, and it is he - little though we realise until the end - to whom all the messages were actually intended for.
The film's values are therefore universal, not just for lovers of baseball. It also belies the notion that all ghosts are scary. One such is represented by the lost figure of Archibald "Moonlight" Graham - a player who was selected to play major league baseball but never got his chance to play and spent his time in the reserves dugout. Injury and fate contrived not to allow his big moment on the field, and he retires to become a country doctor until his death in 1972 - the year of The Godfather, as Robinson likes to point out - where Ray suddenly finds himself in a classic Twilight Zone-style moment walking along the street in the town of Burt Lancaster's Dr. Graham.
Graham is more benevolently resigned to his fate: saddened but not embittered. He leaves Ray to his own time and destiny - yet on the way back home, Ray picks up a young hitchhiker (Frank Whaley), by the name of Archie Graham.
In a film of few melodramatic momeents - but often melancholy, whimsically reflective ones - it's most dramatic moment is when little Karin falls down and nearly suffocates. Call the Doctor, Ray immediately thinks - and looks at young Archie.
It also turned to be Burt Lancaster's last cinematic farewell. A worthy final act.
