Baseball Movie Review: Field of Dreams

Since there are so many books and movies about baseball, I thought it would be fun to make reviews a regular feature of this blog. I hope I can offer a fresh perspective on even the most well-known baseball stories.

I’ve seen Moneyball, 42, and Million Dollar Arm, but I need to re-watch them before I review them. I don’t think I’ve read any baseball books yet but I’m looking forward to reviewing both fiction and nonfiction. I don’t have a schedule or a reading/watching list; I’ll just review things as they pique my interest. Feel free to make suggestions!

Today’s subject is Field of Dreams, which I saw for the first time last weekend. I knew the movie was famous but didn’t know what to expect other than a guy building a baseball field in a cornfield. I actually put off watching this because I figured it would be cheesy and/or macho and I’d hate it. It was not what I expected and I liked it more than I thought I would. However, that the things that caught my attention were probably beside the point and the plot. Spoilers ahead!

Ray, a hippie-turned-farmer, hears a voice that tells him to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield. The voice periodically offers further cryptic instructions and Ray deduces that he’s supposed to go on a road trip. Meanwhile, Ray and his wife Annie are about to lose the farm thanks to financial problems caused by their esoteric construction project because of course they are. Ray returns home with reclusive writer Terence Mann and a young baseball player from an alternate timeline named Archie Graham. Dead guys play baseball on Ray’s field for a few minutes. Then Ray’s brother-in-law Mark assaults Ray’s young daughter Karin, Karin almost dies and is saved by the main-timeline version of Archie Graham, and Ray learns that the whole adventure was about his difficult relationship with his deceased father because of course it was.

Ray’s Field of Dreams gives disgraced or disappointed baseball players a second chance to make their dreams come true. But why on Earth does the story grant this wish to white guys who didn’t succeed as much as they’d hoped to or who explicitly committed baseball-related crimes? Ray’s most famous visitors are Shoeless Joe Jackson and the Black Sox. What about the women and people of color who were completely locked out of Major League Baseball? They, not the Black Sox, are the truly disenfranchised. Ignoring them in favor of shady white dudes is ridiculous.

Despite this massive flaw in the story, I was surprised by how well the film treats its female characters. Annie is three-dimensional. Her participation in Ray’s dream is refreshing. She doesn’t play Buzzkill Mom to Ray’s Dreamer Dad; she’s practical and she gets to go to Narnia. The scene where Annie disrupts a PTA meeting by calling another mom a Nazi for trying to ban books is the most dated part of the movie: Annie defends her left-leaning position with “freedom” and “the Constitution,” and I suspect based on how this scene is handled that real Nazis weren’t the visibly serious problem in 1989 that they are in 2020. Nevertheless, I liked how Annie gets to be opinionated and goofy even when she’s a mom doing mom things. Karin is depicted respectfully too. Her father takes her seriously and treat her interest in baseball as genuine. Has gender stereotyping in movies gotten worse since the 1980s? I believe some critics say yes. I shouldn’t be surprised by a movie that depicts women and girls as normal human beings.

Terence Mann is the film’s only Black character—again, this is completely ridiculous—but at least he too feels three-dimensional. We learn how his writing influenced Ray and Annie but he isn’t reduced to a saintly font of wisdom: he has independent motivations, a sense of humor, and a drive to live life on his own terms. He even gets his own (delightfully unsettling) story arc.

The unsettling weirdness is what I liked best about Field of Dreams. I’m a medievalist, so I enjoy sketchily-explicated supernatural characters and plot devices. Field of Dreams reminds me a little of Pasolini’s adaption of The Canterbury Tales, although I suspect the ontological shiftiness of the former is less intentional. The baseball and the father-son relationship are why Field of Dreams exists but the mysterious spiritual laws that govern the story make it interesting.

The movie refuses to answer some pretty pressing questions. “Is this Heaven?” the dead baseball players ask, and Ray replies “No, it’s Iowa.” But what is Iowa? A place where the living and the dead comingle? A liminal space between life and afterlife? A geographical catalyst for otherworldly encounters? A place where divergent timelines cross? But wait, there’s more. If Ray is capable of time travel, does that mean he’s dead too? Are the baseball players ghosts or does Ray’s field exist outside the boundaries of time? It makes sense that Ray, Annie, Karin, and Terence can see the players—they believe—and Mark can’t—he doesn’t—but what about the thousands of people lined up to visit the Field of Dreams? If they can’t see the players, will they ask for their money back?

The cinematography, score, and foley art (those crickets!) beautifully describe the rural gothic setting. Eerie rustlings in the corn and little Karin’s confident clairvoyance add to the uncanny. But the movie never hits the viewer over the head with spookiness. Instead, the spookiness seems beside the point. The movie’s own explicit attempt to make meaning falls flat: “They’ll arrive at your door, as innocent as children, longing for the past,” says Terence; “It’ll be just like when they were little kids, a long time ago,” Karin adds. Because baseball is a constant throughout US history that evokes positive memories of a simpler time, I guess?

I’m left thinking about how baseball in Field of Dreams represents a facet of American culture whereby white men who feel they didn’t get a fair shot at “the game” are given improbable chance after improbable chance while the rest of us line up passively to witness them, compelled to cheer them on for reasons we don’t understand. The rules of the game are never explicit; we’re asked to believe that their presence on the field is divinely ordained. It’s reasonable to read Field of Dreams as corny family fun. But why would you want to when another interpretation is lurking ominously in the cornfield?

I’m curious how this movie compares to the book it’s based on, Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella. I might have to review that at some point, too.