Ray’s wife & daughter can see the players but Ray’s brother-in-law, who only sees the land for its real estate value, can’t, and thinks the others are crazy for seeing something that isn’t there. The ghosts of the Black Sox players, beginning with Shoeless Joe, begin to appear on Ray’s surreal baseball field amid the corn. It’s a story about possibilities, about ghosts & visions, more a tale of what one wishes would happen rather than what really did happen. That juxtaposition seems very timely in a summer when artists are going broke because of a pandemic. Argh now I have to pull out Eight Men Out and watch it again.įield of Dreams is less about the business of baseball than the poetry of the game especially when understood in context with the value of real estate. The two films – Eight Men Out (1988) and Field of Dreams (1989) – might be yin and yang, a complementary pair of opposites. Unlike Field of Dreams, it’s about the hard realities of the game & the business of baseball, surely the best movie ever made about the game. And in passing it will offer you the best performance of John Cusack’s career. If you want to know more about this, you must see Eight Men Out, a film that will give you most of the facts of the complex story of bribes and bettors. The story of the Chicago White Sox players taking bribes to throw the 1919 World Series has become known as the Black Sox Scandal. The Shoeless Joe of the title is of course Shoeless Joe Jackson, who was among the players given a lifetime ban from professional baseball by Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the first major league commissioner, and a figure determined to bring integrity to baseball. Ray’s father had been a ballplayer and an admirer of Shoeless Joe. He seems like a stranger in a strange land, both on his farm, and especially when he starts to hear voices & see visions: leading him to build a baseball field in the middle of the corn on his Iowa farm. The farmer we meet played by Kevin Costner is Ray Kinsella. The protagonist of the book has a similar surname to the novelist. I make no apology that I’m offering spoilers for a novel & a film that appeared more than 30 years ago, back in the 1980s. If you’ve seen the film you’d probably enjoy the book, although there’s a great deal that comes across differently with the help of cinema, the actors & the music of James Horner. I hope you noticed that it’s not just about baseball, that the game is a backdrop rather than the real subject.įield of Dreams is based on Shoeless Joe a novel by Canadian WP Kinsella.
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