![]() ![]() ![]() I have my own children now, growing older. I sometimes fear all it takes is for a boy to look sadly at his father and I’ll be weeping. October Sky, another piece of rural American sentiment, left me in floods of tears. More than 20 years later, Field of Dreams doesn’t have the same effect on me, though films in which a father dies leaving an unresolved relationship with his son can still surprise me by overwhelming me with emotion. People who had been touched by the film came on their own pilgrimages to the site, though with a certain grim inevitability it was never as pure and simple as one might hope: the diamond had actually been built across two farms, and the two families operated their separate parts of the field with different tourist facilities, and argued about the ongoing commercialisation of the site. ![]() The film had been shot on a farm in Dyersville, Iowa, and after the film-makers left, the farmers who owned the land maintained the baseball diamond. Despite the mixed reviews, Field of Dreams became a hit, and – incredibly – a self-fulfiling prophecy. I would never know his dreams and disappointments. I would never have that moment of playing catch. The conclusion of Field of Dreams didn’t suddenly bring home to me my loss it made me acutely aware that I was never going to be able to add colour and detail to the shadow figure that was my father. It wasn’t that there was conflict in my relationship with Dad it was the knowledge that he had died before he knew who I was, or I knew who he really was. You can almost smell the manure coming off the page. There’s no way to write that down without making sound like the most enormous heap of hokum. ![]() He’s building it for his late father, who appears as a young man at the end of the film to fulfil his dream of playing with the Sox – and to give Kinsella the chance to play catch with the father he never resolved his relationship with. The truth is that Costner’s character, Ray Kinsella, isn’t building the diamond for the players. When Kevin Costner builds the baseball diamond on the cornfields of his Iowa farm, he thinks he’s building it to answer the needs of those baseball players, especially “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, the baseball great who was brought low by the fixing of the 1919 World Series, giving rise to the myth of the young boy who begged of him outside the courtroom: “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” But that first time I saw it, sitting on my mum’s sofa, it made me weep. And – in the most materialistic way imaginable for a film that’s ostensibly spiritual – it has the crass message that there’s always money to be made from following your dream. Field of Dreams, I can’t deny, is trite and sentimental it’s deeply conservative, not just in its conception of a heartland America, but also in its vision of the innocence of the past (the ghostly baseball players who materialise from the 1980s corn, the disgraced Chicago White Sox of 1919, are themselves trying to return to a prelapsarian state). In the New Yorker, Pauline Kael swatted it aside as “a crock … the opening salute of the Bush era” Time called it “the male weepie at its wussiest” the Nation said “it gives wish fulfilment a bad name”. What I am certain of is that he would have dismissed Field of Dreams, as did so many critics when it was released in 1989. I don’t know: this was all a long time ago, and memory plays tricks, not least when it comes to defining one’s relationship to one’s family. He let me develop the space to have my opinions about films – he scoffed at my conviction that Heaven’s Gate, in its long form, was one of the best films ever made, but he liked the fact that at least I had the conviction, I think. He got me watching Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola and Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut. In those far-off days when films took years to come to TV, and the Christmas schedules would be full of stuff the terrestrial channels had saved up to premiere – like Field of Dreams in 1993 – as well as seasons of the great directors and actors, he and I would watch the best films on TV together. We both loved football, we were both passionate about music, but we were at our closest, probably, over film. ![]()
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