My "get psyched for the baseball season" movie came just a wee bit later than usual this year.That's right, after a delay of nearly four months from COVID-19, baseball players across the land are going to start hitting balls into empty stands just a little more than 24 hours from now. We'll see how long they keep doing that, but I'm remaining optimistic for now.
And so it was that my long-delayed rewatch of Field of Dreams could finally commence on Tuesday night.
Long-delayed within 2020, but also long-delayed within the scope of my life. My records don't go back far enough to be sure about this, but I'd say it has been at least 25 years, and possibly closer to 30, since I've seen this movie. I'd say I probably saw it three times within the first five years it existed (that would be 1989 to 1994), but since then, nada.
The reason that's so strange is that I think so highly of it. It is currently ranked 51st out of more than 5,000 films on my Flickchart. Scanning the titles that are ahead of it, I can say with certainty that I've seen all of them more recently than Field of Dreams, and some of them as many as six or seven times in that span. You have to go all the way down to Malcolm X at 76 to find a film I haven't seen since the last time I saw Field of Dreams, and the only reason for that is that I rarely feel like I have a three-hour viewing of Malcolm X in me -- so rarely, in fact, that I have still only seen it that one time. (Had a pretty powerful effect on me, though, to make my top 100.)
I have no fear of excessive running times to explain my Dreams drought, nor any real concern that I would like it any less well this time than I had on my previous viewings.
Well, maybe I should have been fearing that second possibility after all.
Shock of shocks, horror of horrors, I didn't really like Field of Dreams on this viewing.
How could that be? Isn't this The Greatest Baseball Movie of All Time?
Well, others would surely dispute you on that. You'd hear other candidates like Eight Men Out (which I love) and The Natural (WHICH I STILL HAVEN'T SEEN!!) in that discussion. But most people would have Field of Dreams at least in their top three, wouldn't they?
Well, not me. Not anymore.
I don't think it's possible to accurately convey to you how surprised I am about this, but Field of Dreams dropped hard in my estimation when I watched it this time. I'm scared to re-rank it on Flickchart because I don't dare ask myself how far it might fall.
I think part of the problem is that this is a crazy story full of crazy people.
No, I'm not talking about the type of "crazy person" who drinks too much and jumps from a roof into a swimming pool at a party. I'm talking about actually, clinically insane people.
You know it's worrisome when you watch Field of Dreams and you side with a snivelling Timothy Busfield.
Busfield plays the brother-in-law of Kevin Costner's Ray Kinsella, and the movie is beyond eager for you to boo him. He's always shaking his head in frustration and disbelieving the gall of Ray and his family. If he had a moustache he'd twirl it.
But you know what? Busfield is right.
Because Ray Kinsella shouldn't mow down a patch of his best crop to build a baseball field, not to mention one with hundred-foot tall, stadium-quality lights. He shouldn't risk the financial future of his family on an eccentric whim, even if it looks awfully nice next to that cornfield.
Especially if it's because a disembodied voice told him to.
The phrase "If you build it, he will come" has been parodied in a number of settings over the years, but always lovingly so. We seemed to be unified in our love for Field of Dreams when it first came out and was nominated for best picture. If a voice told Kevin Costner to build a baseball field, we thought that was surely something he should listen to. Screw that stupid Timothy Busfield and his, you know, tendency to disbelieve in the supernatural.
But I don't think the building the field part was even really what turned me so much against this movie.
I started to get a bit tetchy when Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) just appears in the field one day. It isn't a life-defining moment for them, though. It's like they were expecting him to materialize and would have been surprised if he hadn't. "He came to life. Good for him." The three family members just give each other these knowing looks, which seem to say, "See? If you believe in ghosts, they will just show up. Good for us for believing in ghosts. We're the good guys here."
So next in the plot, after a random PTA meeting in which Amy Madigan shouts down Lee Garlington for her wicked witchy desire to burn books, Ray decides he needs to help a 60s radical and Pulitzer Prize winning author with a baseball bucket list he didn't know he had. So again, acting on something between eccentricity and insanity, he decides he has to drive to Boston to take Terrence Mann (James Earl Jones) to a baseball game between the Boston Red Sox and the Oakland A's. This particular game, you would assume, though how Ray knows that is anybody's guess. One wonders if Lee Garlington had been talking about burning the books of Charles Dickens instead, whether Ray would have decided he had to go back in time to take Dickens to a baseball game instead of Terrence Mann. Don't laugh, because time travel will be proven possible in just a few scenes.
So they go to this baseball game, where I was immediately bothered by some stupid details that might only bother a person who really knows baseball. As Ray and Terrence sit in the stands, watching the game, a clock at Fenway Park shows that it is 10:32 p.m. Given that most baseball games start at 7, this would have to be the very end of the game, if not extra innings. Yet when the voice speaks to Ray again -- "Go the distance" this time -- he writes the phrase on his scorebook, in the empty space where innings upon innings of a box score should have been kept. What, did Ray just write the players' names in and then decide not to keep score?
Okay, so they also get the message flashing up on the scoreboard about the lifetime stats of Archibald "Moonlight" Graham, who played in only a single game and didn't even get an at-bat. One would assume they needed to come to this particular game, because this message was only going to flash on the scoreboard once, so they better be there to see it. Why it would come up during a random game between two teams who are not even division rivals, and who do not factor in to Ray's or Terrence's personal history with baseball, is, again, anybody's guess.
So despite giving no outward reaction whatsoever, Terrence later admits he also saw the message and heard the voice, and switches from being annoyed and perplexed by Ray to deciding that they need to go to Moonlight Graham's home town in Minnesota together. Although I can't be certain about this, the movie makes it appear that they just start driving directly from the game, without even Terrence having time to go home to pack a suitcase.
When they get to Minnesota, they find out that shit, Graham has been dead for 16 years. Life sucked before the internet. But this is not going to stop Ray. And suddenly he walks into a time warp back to 1972, a time period that is laboriously established through would-be blow-your-mind moments. Seeing that The Godfather is playing on the local theater marquee is not enough. Ray has to go dust some dirt off a license plate to see that it expires in 1972.
And look! There's Archibald Graham!
Okay so then they decide they finally need to return to Iowa. Mann is coming. I guess he believed Ray's whole "I travelled back to 1972 and talked to an old Archibald Graham" story.
As they are approaching the house, they pick up a hitchhiker. Why this hitchhiker? Does Ray often pick up hitchhikers? Good thing they did because this is also Archibald Graham, only younger. Again, knowing glances between Terrence and Ray, like this is exactly what they were expecting to happen, even though they were not following any particular series of rules established by this world, because there are no rules established by this world.
The young Graham gets his own bucket list dream of playing with Jackson and a bunch of other players from the teens and 20s. Until the moment when Mean Old Busfield shows up again and somehow manages to knock Ray's daughter off the bleachers, where she appears to be dead.
Good thing there's a doctor on hand! Only, Graham isn't a doctor yet, and he has to step off the field and become an old man in order to help her. His sage medical advice? That the girl is choking on a hot dog and someone needs to whack her back. How he determined that is unclear, as she's just lying there like some corpse. See how mean Mean Old Busfield is?
Of course, now Mean Old Busfield becomes Good Old Busfield as he's just seen a 70-year-old doctor materialize from a baseball field where he had previously not see any baseball players, because he did not "believe" I guess. But now he can see the baseball players. But how did a doctor emerge from the baseball players? Ray just grins. He will explain later.
But now because he's become an old ghost, Young Ghost Graham can no longer play ghost baseball and he has to disappear into the never never forever.
So it's time for all the other players to leave for the night, and also for Terrence to leave, because they have invited him into the corn. Is Terrence worried he's going to die? Apparently not. I mean, he can now, because he went to that game between the Red Sox and A's that he left early in a grumpy mood -- even though 10:32 is not early, as previously discussed. His bucket list is now complete.
But then Ray recognizes that the catcher is his father. Did his father play baseball? I didn't think so. I thought he was just a baseball fan. Anyway.
So now it's the big emotional moment that always killed me when I was younger. Ray gets to have one last throw with his dad. Who wouldn't get choked up by that?
Except on this viewing I realized we have no idea why this is so important to Ray. In the opening narration, Ray mentions that his father was old when he had him and that they were a bit distant, but I guess baseball was something they had in common. But we don't really learn why they were distant or what the nature of the distance was. In fact, I was struck with the realization that we don't really know anything about these characters beyond the basic outline of the things that happen in this story. AND MOST OF THOSE THINGS ARE CRAZY.
As they are playing catch, like literally a thousand cars drive up to Ray's baseball field. I guess these poor hypnotized people are supposed to fork over money to Ray so his family won't go bankrupt. But isn't that kind of weird? Hypnotizing people into paying you money? And now, as a friend I was discussing this with today pointed out, now these thousands of people all know that ghosts exist? Isn't there a bit of a problem with this?
I was shocked by just how incredibly hokey and just plain ridiculous this whole thing is. And though I feel like a part of my childhood has been killed, I think it's important to know these things, to see the truth in what a movie is really doing and what it really has to offer. Absurd profundities that don't follow rules and have only a flimsy connection to each other, underscored by plaintive piano any time some new absurd profundity occurs, does not a movie make.
I suppose it's in keeping with 2020 that I watched a movie to get me excited for the baseball season, and it ended up making me seriously dislike a movie I thought I loved.
However, it did help me in one way. More than once, when it was the end of March and pitchers were about to throw their first pitches of the new season, I watched another baseball movie from 1989, Major League, to whet my appetite even further for the coming season. If you had asked me to compare Major League and Field of Dreams, I would have said I love Major League, but it couldn't hold a candle to Field of Dreams.
Now I know I got that backward. And that I don't love one of these movies at all.
Was I under some kind of hypnosis back then, like the people summoned to that field in Iowa? Or was the amount that Amy Madigan reminded me of a girl I had a crush on at the time a stronger factor in my feelings about this movie than I thought?
I kind of wish I had gone another 25 years before I saw Field of Dreams again.
The good news?
Baseball will, indeed, soon start in 2020, however delayed, however long it lasts. And that does make me believe.
Play ball.
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