File Under ‘Favorites’ – FIELD OF DREAMS

Tomorrow is Father’s Day, and while it may be cliche one of the strongest bonds between my father and I is the game of baseball. So I thought I’d dust off this long-forgotten feature of mine, and take another look at FIELD OF DREAMS. I know – I’m amazingly original.

FIELD OF DREAMS was released in 1989, and has aged amazingly well. It’s turned into the guy’s chick flick, and is a movie known to even move some men to tears (guilty). It might be because we all turn to blubbering babies when our favorite athletes or teams succeed, and therefore a story rooted in sports finds the chink in our machismo armour. Or for some of us, the story of how Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) and his father bonded through the game plays a familiar chord, and as such strikes to the heart of our memories and relationships with the men who raised us.

FIELD OF DREAMS can lay it on pretty thick sometimes. The movie was made at the twilight of baseball’s modern era, at a time when sickening salaries and performing enhancing drugs were undertones of the sport – not an everyday theme. As such, the game has lost its lustre in the 17 years that have passed – so monologues about the beauty of the sport spoken by James Earl Jones and Burt Lancaster don’t resonate the way they once did. They still give me a tingle or two, but then again I’m the sort of person who has driven five hours to watch a last-place team play a second-last-place team, just because I heard the stadium was nice.

Aside from some weather-worn pageantry about the beauty of the game, the movie holds up well because of a slight touch of timelessness. While set in 1989, the movie spends much of its energy looking back to the past – to the sixties, the forties, and even the twenties. As such – it doesn’t seem too interested in the eighties. Given the choice, the characters and settings in this story aren’t the sort that wouldn’t have changed too much since 1972. It might not have been a deliberate device, but it’s worked well looking back now.

Much of the story focuses on Ray’s falling out with his father, and by association his father’s idolization of Chicago White Sox legend “Shoeless” Joe Jackson. That his father looks up to a man banned for life is a key point, because it illustrates what we look for in our fathers. Jackson made a mistake, a big one that cost him dearly the rest of his life. But for John Kinsella, that didn’t matter. The man was a touchstone for who he wanted to be, and he accepted him, cracks and all.

For many of us, that’s the way we look at our own parents. We can’t choose them, and by the time we get old enough to realize that we want to – we can’t change them. So we take who they are, cracks and all, and we hold them up for better or for worse as heroes. Shoeless Joe took gamblers’ money in an agreement to throw the 1919 World Series…but was that mistake, the sort of thing that erases every other great thing he accomplished? John Kinsella didn’t think so. And when we look at the missteps our own parents have taken, many of us don’t think that those missteps erase what they have done for us as their children.

My father taught me how to to play the game of baseball, it was the first sport he ever taught me, and the one I play the best (which admittedly is amazingly poor). He brought me to my first Major League game when I was eight years old, and still takes a road trip with me to an out-of-town game every summer. Our relationship isn’t nearly as complicated as The Kinsellas, but we’ve always seemed most at ease when the conversation and activity has a diamond and nine men near by.

FIELD OF DREAMS has always been one of my all-time favorite movies, and as I think about it, think about my love for baseball, and my love for my father, it’s not terribly hard to figure out why.