Field of Dreams (1989)

2008 #38
Phil Alden Robinson | 103 mins | TV | PG / PG

I’ve never made much of an effort to see Field of Dreams, for a couple of reasons. Aside from its famous mantra/catchphrase (“if you build it he will come”), the only things I’d heard were it was mawkishly sentimental and was about Kevin Costner trying to build a baseball pitch for a ghost — which doesn’t sound particularly exciting and is about sport, something I’m not very fond of. Of course, as anyone who’s seen it will know, I was a tad misled on that last point, as the glorified rounders pitch is built in the first 20 minutes. What follows certainly has its fair share of sentimentality, but I wouldn’t call it mawkish.

In fact, it’s almost unremittingly pleasant. The lack of anything hard-hitting is no doubt why some have such a dim view of the film, as “nice” has become synonymous with “not very good” in modern parlance (I blame Primary School teachers desperate to increase vocabulary). Field of Dreams won’t shock you, it likely won’t make you think very hard, and any moral message or meaning it has is positive and reassuring… but what’s so wrong with that? The plot keeps moving, refusing to be bogged down in navel-gazing or star-gazing. The story is also too unusual to be marred by any serious degree of predictability, though some events are of course easily guessed, but the mystery of how the various elements would come together kept my attention throughout. Crucially, it doesn’t labour its sentimentality or batter you round the head with morals or meanings. It’s hardly ambiguous, but nor is it over done.

Field of Dreams may not be astounding filmmaking — it’s not especially complex, radical, thrilling, thought-provoking, intense or revolutionary, nor terribly serious or terribly funny, nor indeed wholly original — but it is nice. And I mean that in a good way.

Field of Dreams is on ITV today, Saturday 27th September 2014, at 2:35pm.