At first, Terence refuses to join Ray at a ball game then, miraculously, the cantankerous writer begins to hear The Voice and gets caught up in The Dreams. Terence (James Earl Jones), the voice of the '60s and Ray's favorite novelist, is disillusioned and no longer writes. Kinsella's "Shoeless Joe," the novel that inspired the movie). And boom, next thing you know, Ray's left Annie to fend off bankruptcy alone while he drives to Boston to meet with famous author Terence Mann (J.D. Comes the rumble from thin air: "Ease his pain."īy now we're beginning to wonder where in the world this story is going, what's the point, who's on first? We were expecting fast and down the middle, and then writer-director Phil Alden Robinson throws a golldarn screwball. Meanwhile, as you might well imagine, the Kinsellas are unable to pay the mortgage, having plowed under a portion of their crop and spent all their savings to fund Ray's obsession. Time passes - we are reminded of Noah awaiting the rains - when out of the corn comes Shoeless Joe. Pickups line the highway as the townsfolk come on over to observe Ray round off the pitcher's mound, pour the lines of lime, mount floodlights and bleachers. To the American Gothic locals, however, this is a family of flakes. Their adorable daughter Karin (Gaby Hoffman), weaned on baseball, never doubts her daddy. "Don't you hate when that happens?" says Annie. "Build what and who will come?" asks his spunky, supportive wife Annie (Amy Madigan), who first thinks he's having an acid flashback. "Build it and he will come," The Voice kind of mumbles. Ray, a '60s flower child turned farmer, builds the ballpark after hearing The Voice. Joe (Ray Liotta) is, like Casper, a friendly spirit who haunts the present-day baseball diamond that Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) creates in his cornfield. The batty "Field of Dreams" redeems Joe Jackson in the afterlife. "Eight Men Out" used the soiled Sox to underscore the modern decline of honor. Shoeless Joe, one of them, maintained that he was innocent and went off to get fat and play under an assumed name in the minor minor leagues. And the baseball commissioner threw eight White Sox out of the game. Like "Eight Men Out," this movie springs from the Black Sox scandal of 1919, the year the Chicago White Sox threw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. This is the myth of peanuts and Cracker Jack, ball play as next to God, and Shoeless Joe Jackson as archangel. The characters wax ever poetic over the glories of bat, glove and ball. "Field of Dreams," a ghostly baseball story, couldn't have a better setting than an Iowa cornfield.
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