field of dreams (phil alden robinson, 1989)

It had been a long time since I saw this one. I remember not liking it. It was right. Phil Alden Robinson gives us no feel for the actual game of baseball, only for the mystique, and I'm a fan of the game of baseball more than I am of the mystique. And, as Pauline Kael said, "That the film is sincere doesn't mean it's not manipulative".

The film posits that we need to return to the past. It's interesting that there is no irony in a black man giving the famous speech about the sport: "The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time." It should be ironic ... the players who emerge from the corn fields are all white, because black players weren't allowed in the majors for thirty more years. And the core narrative, that a young man, a child of the 60s, is not fulfilled until he reconnects with his father who is most certainly not of the 60s, is as reactionary as Forrest Gump.

It's not all bad. Three cheers for the young Gaby Hoffman. And it's nice as always to see Burt Lancaster, in what turned out to be his last appearance in a feature film. But I was disappointed overall. Not sure why, given my memories were that it wasn't a very good movie, but for some reasons, my hopes were up, and I wanted my past self to be proven wrong.