You Gotta Believe to Enjoy ‘Field of Dreams’

The movie is called “Field of Dreams,” and it made Brooks Robinson cry.

“Field of Dreams” is a baseball movie--and it’s not. It’s a mystical, magical, whimsical romp that’s mostly about dreams and making them come true. It’s about hope and belief and about second chances.

Some have called it sappy, and it is in places, and some have called it a nostalgic journey in search of something that never was, which is what nostalgia usually amounts to.

Yet it is a baseball movie, too, with all the familiar trappings, which one either accepts or does not.

Robinson, who saw the movie on the advice of Jim Palmer, never goes to see baseball movies. In fact, he likes to joke that the last movie he saw was “The Longest Day,” during which, by the way, he did not cry, or even sniffle.

But when the little girl in “Field of Dreams” comes to her daddy to say there’s a man on his lawn--his lawn being a full-blown baseball field that he has improbably carved out of his Iowa cornfield--and the man is a ghostly image of Shoeless Joe Jackson, Robinson became caught up in the wonder of this movie and never escaped.

One would have thought it would be another scene that would move the former star. It’s Shoeless Joe, come back to life, talking about the pain of his exile from baseball after the gambling scandal that gave us the Chicago Black Sox.

In W.P. Kinsella’s book, “Shoeless Joe,” upon which the movie is based, Jackson says being forcibly removed from baseball was “like having a part of me amputated, slick and smooth and painless. . . . I’m told that old men wake in the night and scratch itchy legs that have been dust for fifty years. That was me. Years and years later, I’d wake in the night with the smell of the ballpark in my nose and the cool of the grass on my feet. The thrill of the grass . . . “

Given that the real Jackson was illiterate, that’s a fairly eloquent speech, but, what the heck, he’s a ghost.

That’s one of the points of the movie, the blurry line between the plausible and the implausible. If you don’t buy the premise, you don’t buy the movie. If you allow yourself to be seduced by the plot, you will enjoy the movie very much.

In the movie, a former college radical comes to Iowa to be a farmer, and he hears a voice telling him, “If you will build it, he will come.”

Build what? Who will come? Shoeless Joe Jackson, who was kicked out of the game along with seven others for throwing the 1919 World Series, will come. Jackson was the leading hitter in the Series, and some say he was a victim as much as a criminal.

Anyway, what Ray Kinsella, the Iowa farmer and baseball lover and soon-to-be mystic, builds is a baseball field, putting his small farm at risk in the process.

Eventually, Jackson appears, walking out of the cornfield, and soon brings with him his fellow exiles, who have been wandering the world, or at least the cornfields of the world, since their deaths, looking for such a baseball field.

Only Ray and his family can see the players (they’re the only ones who believe). Ray hears the voice (whose voice? God’s? Vin Scully’s?) again, and it tells him, “Ease his pain.”

And so he sets off in search of a writer-turned-recluse (J.D. Salinger in the book; a fictional character in the movie), and they, in turn, go off in search of a now-dead player-turned-doctor who played one inning in the big leagues but never got an at-bat.

But what Ray is truly searching for is his dead father, who was consumed by baseball and with whom Ray shared a stormy relationship that the son regrets.

The movie is not perfect. Jackson, who hit from the left side, is a ghostly right-handed hitter. During a game at Fenway Park, there is no line at the concession stand. The writer who needs his pain eased is black, and yet he becomes soothed by these old-time, all-white players who routinely excluded blacks. The baseball, as it is played, is ghostlike, too--no energy.

One of the principal criticisms of the movie is that the lead character (played by Kevin Costner, of “Bull Durham” fame) follows unknown voices that any sane man might ignore. But sanity is not what the movie is about. It’s not insanity, either. At the core of “Field of Dreams” is hope. That’s where the baseball comes in.

Baseball, in this context, is meant to evoke innocence, especially the innocence of eight players tainted by the greatest scandal in the game’s history. It says they should have a second chance. It says we should all have a second chance.

We have seen over the years how difficult it is to capture magical realism on the screen. If we take “The Natural” as an example, the book was magic while the movie was a two-dimension copy that never came to life. But in “Field of Dreams,” the magic, goofy as it sometimes may be, is there. One has only to believe in it.