Iowa, heaven, and other utopias

Field of Dreams

(1989)

In brief (reserving the right to expand later on): when this was released, I found it absolutely enchanting, so when, a decade or so later, I saw the VHS at Sam's Club for $5.99 (the details may be slightly off, but the gist is accurate--and it was definitely a VHS), I bought it and watched it again almost immediately--and found it one of the most cynically manipulative, sentimental, cliché-ridden pieces of crap I'd ever wasted 2 hours on. If I hadn't already developed the Where Your Head Is on a Particular Day theory of film criticism, this film must have given birth to it.

So maybe a year or so ago, I thought maybe I should give it one last screening--the rubber game of a three-game series, as it were--and during the baseball season the thought turned into a resolution, and I mentioned it to my grad school friend Michael, who said he'd been thinking the same. He had, I think, never been as enchanted as I, but he liked it enough to watch it a second time, and his reaction that time was much like mine.

So I suggested that we wait until both his Yankees and my Mets were finished playing for the year, watch the film, and carry on an email conversation about it, which I would then reproduce in lightly edited form here. I was gratified by how late the Mets' season ended, but the weekend after that, we proceeded with our plan, and herewith our email conversation over several days:

CB--Unsurprisingly, I found it neither remotely as magical as I did in 1988 nor nearly as execrable it seemed a decade or so later. I was engaged by the early Iowa scenes, but it started to lose me on the trip to Boston and then Minnesota. Nor was the central issue against it the sentimental manipulation (not that that's not overwhelming, but it actually worked on me 2 or 3 times, especially in the first full-fledged game, with Archie Graham batting against Eddie Cicotte) or the ladeling on of cliché (also as remembered).

No, what made it impossible for me to give myself up was the sheer lack of logic. "Huh?" you ask. Let me explain. The Wizard of Oz operates on a framework of perfect interior logic: Dorothy must "escape" Kansas, must go to a Technicolor land of wonders and terrors, but one populated largely by familiar Kansans, so that she can learn something about herself, and about home. That Miss Gulch becomes twin wicked witches, the 3 farmhands become both guardians and foster children, and Professor Marvel becomes a more dangerous flimflam man--each element is a well-oiled part of the machinery of her epiphany.

But what the hell does a long-dormant writer have to do with this story? Put another way, what difference would it have made if that character were an ex-poli-sci prof Ray & Annie had studied with at Berkeley, or a Gerry Garcia-esque ex-rocker, or a Jerry Brown-esque ex-pol? None that I can see, except for his walking into the cornfield so that he can write the novella we are ostensibly reading (he gives it the title that the real Ray Kinsella gave his novella), but that strikes me as a tenuous function.

And Moonlight Graham, though the story is appealing--half an inning in the bigs, no at-bat--seems too close to the John Kinsella of this narrative, but in reverse: one would-be ballplayer who let failure defeat him, another who found success in life if not on the diamond. It seems at the same time too mechanical and too arbitrary a tie.

Then there's the writing, much of which has all the life and humanity of an IRS schedule. In short, I've seen lots worse pieces of crap, but this still smells less like roasted Iowa sweetcorn than like the fertilizer responsible for that dish.

JMH--[Michael's first entry clearly comprises notes written while watching; I've mostly tried to preserve this flavor, while cleaning up some of his late-night typos--CB.] The intro is revoltingly sentimental. Amy Madigan is cute as a button; that's something. 

This is just stupid, and if I might say that in a more sophisticated way, like you I find the premise here unbelievable: the voice, and then the magically appearing field. Also the unbelievably supportive (if cute) wife. Now the very clumsy exposition about Shoeless Joe. I think I tried to demur when on 2nd view you called this hopeless dreck, but now I'm going to need something to make me take the more positive tack you're now taking.

I like the Shoeless Joe into better: more believable in a narrative sense. The intensity which the actor brings to the part. That was a better scene. I think what I remember liking and believing is the baseball scenes.

The movie would be better if Kevin Costner were a better actor.

But James Earl Jones brings life and believability to his scenes.

At least Costner is a better actor than the little girl.

Jones is trying hard to say this ludicrous speech about people coming to give Ray money. But he's failing.

Heaven is the place dreams come true. This movie has become more sentimental and more poorly written, and that is really tall corn, in more ways than one. 

CB--Yes, the "Heaven is the place . . ." (I can't even bring myself to compete the sentence) is the gloppiest of all the glop, and some of the Jones speeches (they'll come because it's baseball? and baseball has been the one constant that has buoyed the people through all the bad stuff, like wars and depression and . . . uh . . . racism?) constitute crimes against a good actor.

But I wasn't offended by most of it this time, as I was last time and you were this time, and that's consistent with my generally higher tolerance for treacle. Or to the extent I was offended, it was simply that the film's not very good, not very smart--and worse, it pretends to be smart, and to contain mystical truth.

I'm so used to seeing Costner play essentially the same guy every spring, and play it in a way I wouldn't change, that I didn't have a problem with him (though maybe Richard Dreyfus would have been better--it is, after all, essentially his Close Encounters role), and this time I found Madigan tolerable, but I remember last time being fingernails-on-slate maddened by her perkiness.

You mention being impressed by Ray Liotta's performance, and it certainly does bring the one note of gravitas to the film, but here's the problem I have with that: the attitude toward Shoeless Joe is just a lie. He took $3K, $6K, whatever from gamblers, then played well in the Series anyway, and that, in the context of this film, makes him a persecuted hero. And, we are told in so many words, not a criminal. Now if I give you $6K to patch my roof, and you decide that you'd rather not, but you keep my money, haven't you committed the crime of stealing from me? And if I give you $6K to kill the neighbor whose dog craps on my lawn but you think better of it--but keep my money, and don't bother to report the incident to the police, you have committed at least one crime already. We are in this story meant to think that Ray is righting a wrong committed against Jackson and his teammates (it's completely elided that most of the other seven were demonstrably guilty as sin); Jackson is noble, damn near Christlike.

For me, the true cinematic Joe Jackson will already be the one portrayed by D. B. Sweeney in John Sayles's excellent Eight Men Out: not very bright, easily bullied, leagues (!) out of his depth. You can almost imagine the guy being simple enough to take the money but too much in love with the game--with the one arena where he can be brilliant--to grasp how one would even go about giving less than his best. 

JMH--Yes, turning Shoeless Joe into a saint was offensive ethically, and in narrative terms it was so egregiously wrong that it was one more of the ways that the movie made it hard to have a suspension of disbelief. It's like the Gen. DeGaulle statement in Casablanca [i.e., the notion that Vichy or the Gestapo would respect the siganture of the letters of transit of the Free French leader--CB], only in this case it's a historical error constantly asserting itself, rather than made once and then dropped.

I suppose the writers concluded that few would know the facts well enough constantly to be annoyed by the portrayal, but who except a fan not only of baseball but of early baseball would be inclined to sit even through the long, clumsy opening voiceover/montage, let alone the entire movie?

And while I said Madigan is cute as a button, I was actually seeing the Amy of my Field of Dreams dream. I gradually came to see her as less young and pretty than I remembered, as if she has aged not only outside the film but in. It seems unfair that she should age in this way when Shoeless Joe gets to go in reverse, even though he's the ethically challenged one.

CB--Well, yes: some people romanticize baseball even more than I do, to say nothing of more than you do, but any who are also dimwitted enough to accept that a guy is not a criminal merely for accepting payment as part of a criminal enterprise and not reporting that enterprise will buy anything the filmmakers are selling.

Or I suppose if you know enough about the background of the sellout to excuse the Eight on the grounds that Sox owner Charles Comiskey was himself an economic criminal on a much larger scale, effectively inviting the gamblers by paying the slave wages that baseball's slave system made possible, then you're a socialist, and not necessarily a dimwit, and I have more sympathy with that stance. More, but not much. Was Joe Jackson the worst person involved in the scandal? Not by a long shot. Did he deserve the lifetime ban so richly merited by Gandil & Williams & Cicotte & Felsch? I'm inclined to say yes, but I won't spend much effort mooting the moot point with those who feel otherwise. But was he a criminal? Absolutely. Can he reasonably be figured as a hero, even a tragic one? Not in my view.

And speaking of how much knowledge a viewer brings to the film, we haven't mentioned, perhaps because it seems so picayune, the left-handed-hitting elephant in the room.

We're told in the film that Babe Ruth modeled his swing on Jackson's, which I've seen in enough sources to believe. But it's unlikely that he'd have modeled his swing on this Joe's, because this Joe bats right-handed, unlike Ruth and the real Joe. In fact, this Joe--and I presume Liotta--has baseball's rarest bats/throws combination, bats right, throws left, exactly the opposite of Jackson's BL/TR. And to me that's not a picayune point, especially if you're bringing Ruth's idealization into your mythmaking. Did mirrors not exist in 1989, or the ability to reverse film footage? Could not reverse logos be manufactured?

Well, sure, it could have been done right, but it wasn't important enough for the filmmakers to take the trouble. (To be fair, the much better Eight Men Out, though it gets Jackson's BL/TR correct, portrays Eddie Collins as a right-handed hitter, which annoys me just as much, maybe more, given the higher standard I hold Sayles to.)

JMH--Yes I knew about the batting problem. It's not as damaging a mistake narratively because fewer people know it is one, and more importantly, that error doesn't drive the plot. It's a little worse than the annoying DeGaulle error since it's visual, but neither seriously damages my ability to buy into the narrative. The heroizing of Jackson does. That said, making Jackson a hero is way down on the narrative sins of this movie, and if it didn't have the others, I could look past it. Also, it's dimwitted moviemaking to so insist on Jackson as a hero. Lots of people romanticize his on-field accomplishments, and there's an existing narrative for ignoring his participation in the plot; you seem affected by it yourself. (Can there really be even a shred of argument for allowing someone who took money to throw a WS game to ever play again, no matter what anyone else did?). It would have been easy to adapt that existing narrative to the fantasy plot of this movie.

CB--No, I wouldn't have let him play again, as I said, but (as I also said) I'm not going to waste time arguing that moot point with those who claim that his failing was ignorance and/or stupidity, not venality. This film doesn't even have the courage to argue that (as Eight Men Out leans toward doing, without making it exculpatory). Its agenda is not merely historically inaccurate mythmaking; it's historically dishonest mythmaking. Not that a great film can't be made from such an agenda: Bonnie and Clyde comes to mind, and though I've never seen it, I guess Triumph of the Will would also fit.

I think we're in agreement that writer-director Phil Alden Robinson, for whom this was the career high point, is not in any danger of parlaying his dishonesty into Leni Riefenstahl-esque noxious greatness.