Field of Dreams was the first DVD I purchased. I make a viewing of it a rite of Spring, one which I will soon begin sharing with my daughters. I have used Moonlight Graham’s speech about his vocation as a doctor in PSR class. It is a wonderful story about relationships, forgiveness, and redemption.
Nevertheless, I had to agree with a writer in Bill Simmons’ recent mailbag:
Just watched “Field of Dreams” for the umpteenth time and it still gets me choked up, but I noticed a fatal flaw: Terence Mann (African-American and 1960s leftist radical) doesn’t go ballistic when he sees the ghosts from the deadball era and realizes not one is black. Wouldn’t he say, “You mean even in the afterlife you SOBs wouldn’t let Cool Papa Bell, Josh and Satch play?” I mean especially after Ray Liotta describes the place as heaven? Had they cast Sam Jackson instead of James Earl Jones, he would have gone ballistic and arranged a sit-in until justice was brought to Iowa. Either way, why did I have to notice this? I wish my favorite sports movie wasn’t ruined.
To be fair, the Terrence Mann character was a bit of a rush job, since the character in the book was based on J.D. Salinger, and the movie people got late word from Salinger that he didn’t want the movie character to be recognizable as him.
But still.
The main narrative of the first half of the movie is Ray Kinsella addressing the gross injustice that Joe Jackson was denied a chance to play baseball. Now, Joe Jackson wasn’t denied a chance to play baseball because of something like the color of his skin. He was denied the chance to play baseball because he took part in the greatest scandal in modern sports history, being involved in a conspiracy to throw the World Series.
The movie waves this off in a scene where Ray Kinsella explains to his rapt five year old daughter how Shoeless Joe hit over .300 in the Series, and nobody could ever prove that he did anything to lose the Series, while she nods in agreement. If that’s good enough for her, why not you? Who are you to argue with a father passing on the tale of his father’s hero to the granddaughter he would never meet? The Cider House Rules was less manipulative. If Rob Neyer were on that tractor instead of a five year old, we might have gotten closer to the truth.
And even you see Shoeless Joe has a hapless illiterate rube who got sucked in by his dastardly teammates, that doesn’t let the movie off the hook, because at the end of Joe’s first appearance on the field, he mentions the others, and Kinsella invites them all to the field, again implying that he is righting some historic wrong.
Which is OK. You don’t have to buy into a movie’s interpretation of history in order to enjoy it. As Jonah Goldberg pointed out, the idea of a God who would give the Nazis great power just because they happen to find some object is, let’s say, a troubling theology, but I still enjoy the Indiana Jones movies.
But the Terrence Mann character makes it all a little more difficult to ignore, since people who had done nothing wrong were excluded from the game only because they had the same skin color as him.
Yet, Mann seems to think the idea of a field where Shoeless Joe and his fellow conspirators can play is just delightful. He leaps to Jackson’s defense when Kinsella recounts the story of how his teenage self called Jackson a criminal. He gives the impassioned “People will come, Ray” speech that is a valentine to baseball:
Never once does he express the slightest concern that the greatest injustice of baseball at the time, one which would have impacted his ancestors, remains unaddressed.
Again, the Mann character was rushed in and probably was not completely thought through. Still, the movie is what it is, and it implies that it is a gross injustice that those who conspired to bring about a scandal that nearly brought down the game should be denied the chance to play again, while remaining silent on the exclusion of an entire race of people who had done nothing wrong.
Which doesn’t make it a bad movie, but something less than the ideal transcendent experience I’d like it to be.
Say it ain’t so.