1989 was a memorable year for baseball. The Oakland Athletics beat the crosstown rival San Francisco Giants in a World Series that was delayed due to earthquake. Pete Rose was banished from the game. Dave Stieb almost threw a perfect game.
It was also a good year for film. Memorable movies like Driving Miss Daisy, Dead Poets Society, and Do the Right Thing were released to popular and critical acclaim.
Baseball fans and moviegoers alike found something special in Field of Dreams and it sentimental portrait of how America's pastime can flow through a life, a family, and a nation.
Costner's Double Header
Kevin Costner was taking a chance when he signed on to star in Field of Dreams. Having just acted in the successful Bull Durham a year earlier, the risk of becoming tied too closely to baseball movies was obviously present. Costner, then, must have seen what is so apparent to anyone who watches both films today. Despite the fact that they both use baseball as a story device, they are entirely unalike.
Bull Durham is a comedy, more specifically a sex comedy. And most specifically an R-rated sex comedy about baseball players and fans. As effective as its themes and humor may be, it relies primarily on standard story devices and established character types. Any sport or occupation could be inserted in the place of baseball and other than a few jokes needing to be rewritten the same film would show up in the end.
Field of Dreams, on the other hand, has baseball at its core. Directed by Phil Alden Robinson from his own adaptation of W.P. Kinsella's novel, Shoeless Joe, it delves into baseball history to produce characters and invite nostalgia for simpler times. Its PG-rating indicates not childishness but thoughtful simplicity. The film is plotted like a ballgame, with a leisurely pace that allows ample time for contemplation. Like baseball itself, this contemplation doesn't require any special intellectual skill; it just asks for patient attention.
Since it doesn't tell the life story of an athlete or chronicle the struggles of a team, Field of Dreams divorces itself even further from the sports movie genre. Actual baseball footage is kept to a minimum and never the center of attention. Costner's protagonist, Ray Kinsella, is the kind of casual baseball player that millions of Americans are. Each of these details allows the film to tell its story clearly and with emotional authority.
Field of Dreams Plays to the Crowd
Besides being a remarkable film, Field of Dreams is also a superbly executed case of adaptation. The film is much more concise than Kinsella's novel, which uses its 265 pages to tell of secondary characters and events that are welcome in the book but would surely clutter the film. Ray's twin brother is a fascinating study in personality and identity, but the film does just fine without him. The same is true for a series of adventures that Ray has while road-tripping across the country, stopping at ballparks and taking in some local flavor, learning that Iowa might be a lot more like heaven then he ever imagined.
Other alterations are more central to the film, like the substitution of the fictional Terence Mann for the novel's appearance by J.D. Salinger. Not only does it remove the complicated matter of blending fiction with reality but it gives James Earl Jones the opportunity to create one of his most endearing roles.
It surprises many viewers to learn that the story involving Ray and the ghost of his father, so central to the film's statement about baseball uniting generations, is largely absent from the novel. Instead of coming as a reveal in the final moments, it is one of the first developments after Ray's field is built and carries none of the cathartic consequence that it does in the film.
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