The Stuff That ‘Dreams’ Are Made Of

“The willing suspension of disbelief” is one of those phrases you learn at the knee of a zealous English teacher, not long after “I before E except after C.”

It’s true, of course. The play or the movie doesn’t really work if you don’t go along with the game, ignoring the strip of celluloid whirring through the projector, choosing to forget that the door in the set leads not to an English moor but only to the wings.

But some surrenders of disbelief are harder than others. Fantasy takes a lot of surrendering, and even more at the movies than in the theater because, by some sort of paradox, movies are more “realistic” than what living human beings are getting up to on stage only a few feet in front of you.

The vaults are crowded with theatrical fantasies that did not survive the voyage onto film--flights of fancy as different as “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad” and “Man of La Mancha.”

The new baseball film, “Field of Dreams,” is a test case for the surrender of disbelief. Phil Alden Robinson’s adaptation of the W. P. Kinsella novel is a fantasy pure and simple. An Iowa farmer, in the present day, builds a ball field amid his corn in the hope Shoeless Joe Jackson will stroll out of the past and play on it.

As the reviews have proved, there are critics who suspend disbelief in Shoeless Joe’s return, and those who rather violently don’t. As in the film itself, there are disbelievers who don’t see Shoeless Joe and his pals at play, although the farmer (Kevin Costner) and his family and a famous visiting novelist do. Robinson, the writer-director, has said wryly that there are those in the audience who won’t see the players, either.

I confess I have a fondness for film fantasy, going back at least to Lionel Barrymore and Bobs Watson as his grandson, keeping Death up a tree in “On Borrowed Time” in 1939.

I was then at an early age, when fantasy came easier, yet I remember being impressed that the tale was more than an imaginative story. The oddly sobering message (odd in the sense that movies then tended to be resolutely cheerful) was that Death had to be allowed down from the tree because in a world without dying so much suffering was prolonged.

What “Field of Dreams” does so wisely and well is not seek to explain itself. So a heavenly voice in the field says “If you build it, he will come.” So? It’s an improvement on “Send more nitrogen, quick.”

Not a lot of time is wasted on, “You must be out of your mind,” either; just enough to make clear who are the flatfooted materialists and who the true dreamers.

There is a message, lurking somewhere between short and third or out in center field. And it is, I think, that in the years beyond the ‘60s we lost a certain flair for hoping, dreaming and idealizing--and acting on those hopes and dreams--and that maybe we should seek after that spirit again, rather than surrendering to a kind of inhibiting, self-enshrouding cynicism. You can overdose on reality as well as fantasy, is a kind of sub-message in “Field of Dreams.”

An implied charge against the film is that dreams are all the movies sell anyway, and that this one is just more of the same. Yet it seems truer to say that the movies have not sold much innocence in recent times, while a likable innocence is what Robinson’s film has in abundance.

Fantasy works with cynical material as well. The controversial film about high schoolers, “Heathers,” is in its own violent way a fantasy, taking place in a stylized world several sizes larger than life.

Murder and suicide (real and faked) are used to project some angry views (by writer Daniel Waters and director Michael Lehmann) about the lousy values held by young people, often handed down from their self-centered parents.

“Heathers” is weakened ultimately by seeking a “real” explanation for its lethal goings-on, in the person of a psychopathic drifter. The black farce becomes a dark thriller, less satisfactory in the end than it promised to be at the start, but still a startlingly original work.

The gentler uses of fantasy will shortly be seen in “Signs of Life,” in which the demise of a small New England shipbuilding yard, told with considerable verisimilitude, is threaded with yard-owner Arthur Kennedy’s conversations with his long-dead (and youthful) father, and by a miraculous rescue.

In its mixture of realism and fantasy, “Signs of Life,” directed by John David Coles from a script by Mark Malone, suggests (as “Field of Dreams” does) that even ordinary lives can be touched by Otherness, intimations of Something Different, something out there that is larger than we are but that touches our lives: voices in a field, visitations from the dear departed with whom we never quite settled our accounts.