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| Tookey's Review |
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| Pro Reviews |
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| Mixed Reviews |
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| Cast |
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| Released: |
1989 |
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| Genre: |
DRAMA
SPORTS
FANTASY
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
106 |
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A 36 year-old farmer in Iowa (Kevin Costner, pictured left with James Earl Jones) appears a contented family man. But he has nagging regrets.
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Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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He never got on with his dead father; he has not achieved his ambitions; and 60s idealism has given way to narrower concerns. Suddenly, he hears a mysterious voice, telling him to plough up a cornfield and turn it into a baseball park. Sceptical at first, he becomes obsessed with following his dream - or delusion.
Ignore anyone who tells you that Field of Dreams is about baseball: it is no more about baseball than Harvey was about rabbits. Baseball is just a metaphor for personal achievement, reconciliation, and a less mean-spirited society. The story is about exorcising the ghosts, or regrets, from one's past.
Most of the major studios turned down the screenplay; and it certainly strays close to being fey, whimsical and pseudo-religious. Perhaps the film's greatest achievement is that the acting - and not just Costner's - is so realistic that the audience becomes as caught up as the characters in solving the mystery.
If Gabriel Garcia Marques had written Field of Dreams, intellectuals might have hailed it as magic realism. Just because it was a Hollywood project which moves at a decent pace, is humorous and entertaining, and made many million dollars at the box office does not make it any less successful as a modern ghost story. This is an offbeat, lyrical, moving film, pretty much in the same class as Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life.
James Horner's score was Oscar-nominated.
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, Amy Madigan 
from W,P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe