ay Kinsella (Costner), who has owned his farm for only a few years, is interrupted during one sunset inspection of his cornfield by the mysterious whisper, "If you build it, he will come." Though neither his wife, Annie (Madigan), nor his daughter, Karin (Gaby Hoffman), hears anything, and the farm needs every acre productive to avoid financial disaster, subsequent urging by the same mysterious presence leads Ray to plow under part of his cornfield and erect a baseball diamond, complete with lights for night games.
Then, one spring evening, a figure emerges from the corn: the disgraced ballplayer Shoeless Joe Jackson (Liotta), who takes one look around and asks Ray whether this is heaven. "No," Ray says, "This is Iowa." Before long, Jackson returns with some of his old buddies, who commence batting practice while the amazed Kinsellas look on.
But all is not well. Ray's waste of good farmland has his neighbors thinking he's crazy, and the loss of income has the bank threatening to foreclose. The mysterious voice instructs Ray to abandon his failing farm in favor of a quest to collect the reclusive cult author Terence Mann (Jones), who greets him at the door with suspicion and hostility. Further instructions lead the two men on another quest cross-country, and from there to Ray's time-traveling encounter with Archibald Graham (Lancaster), a much-beloved small-town doctor who, as a young man, had once played half an inning in the major leagues.
Ray has no idea why this is happening to him, or how he's going to save the farm, when his brother-in-law Mark (Busfield), who can't see the ghostly players and considers his sister's husband delusional, arrives with the foreclosure papers.
Clearly, there needs to be one more miracle.
And it starts with a bite of hot dog.
A diamond on the edge of heaven
The central location of Field of Dreams is a cornfield, leading to a number of critical cheap shots about all the emotional corn displayed on screen. And indeed, its effect depends entirely on personal vulnerability to this kind of thing; audiences immune to its manipulations are left not just dry-eyed but contemptuous. Those who respond to its spell consider it a moving fantasy, which resonates best when its elements include lost opportunities, unspoken sentiments and life choices that may have been right or wrong, but which are here offered a replay by ghostly intervention. Viewed on that level, it can be considered one of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone Rod Serling never filmed. It just keeps upping the emotional ante, all the way to a conclusion known to leave grown men (and mostly grown men) bawling.
The performances range from adequate to terrific, and chief among them is Kevin Costner's, a statement that is nowadays startling all by itself. The man has spent so much of his career being rightly excoriated for his woodenness playing figures who are supposed to be larger than life, like Robin Hood, Wyatt Earp and Waterworld's Mariner (performances that were, for the most part, stiff, wooden, charisma-free and joyless) that it's sometimes easy to forget how nuanced and charming he can be when playing hapless ordinary men. In Field of Dreams, one of five Costner films featuring connections to baseball, he's moving, indeed, as a man dumbfounded and delighted by the miracles that have taken over his life.
The movie also features the venerable Burt Lancaster, a star since the 1940s, here making his last appearance in a theatrical feature film. He is terrific; his two separate deliveries of the line "I'd better get home. Alicia will think I've got a girlfriend," both emerge as among the movie's high points. Amy Madigan is just as charming, as the film's alternately concerned and amazed Annie Kinsella. The first scenes involving James Earl Jones, as the embittered, reclusive author Terence Mann, are both startling and laugh-out-loud funny, strong reminders of how good he can be when he's actually on-screen and not just providing the voices for Sith Lords, Lion Kings and telephone companies.
The screenplay invokes that oft-venerated, oft-lamented decade, the '60s, on a regular basis, giving that era too much weight for a story that probably functions best when it's timeless. The references date it, but not fatally. Indeed, Terrence Mann is supposed to be a retired '60s icon, which may make more sense to casual viewers once they know that the character in Kinsella's original novel was, specifically, the real-life reclusive author J.D. Salinger, whose own reaction to invasions of his privacy by glory-seeking fans is very much like that the fictional Mann displays in the film. The real Salinger was outraged by his appearance in W.P. Kinsella's novel and threatened litigation if his name was used in the movie. That's his right, of course, and we can't criticize him for it. But, truth to tell, the story works just as well without him.
