Field of Dreams (1989)
Directed by Phil Alden Robinson
Ray Kinsella is an Iowa farmer who hears a mysterious voice telling him to turn his cornfield into a baseball diamond. He does, but the voice's directions don't stop -- even after the spirits of deceased ballplayers turn up to play.
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5 films that influenced Field of Dreams
What critics say influenced Field of Dreams
This is more Field of Dreams than Bull Durham: baseball here is seen as something magical - Redford has a mystical bat named "Wonderboy", which he fashioned from a tree struck by lightning - rather than merely a sport.
The 1984 film The Natural was a mythic and mesmerizing movie about America's favorite pastime that also saluted the heroism of the lonely individualist.
It's like a version of "Harvey" where we see James Stewart and the rabbit, but not the wondering or dyspeptic people around them.
Finally the mists and the cornstalks part, and a Christlike figure appears: Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta), baseball's ultimate outsider-hero, and the central figure in John Sayles' "Eight Men Out" and, a few years ago, "The Natural," where he's the inspiration for Robert Redford's Roy Hobbes.
"Eight Men Out" used the soiled Sox to underscore the modern decline of honor.
All of this would work better if Robinson built up the reality of the town more, made the citizens a more palpable presence, as Frank Capra did in Hollywood's greatest fable-fantasy, "It's a Wonderful Life."
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Lancaster turns in another of the great supporting performances that have become his specialty in recent years - he's as good as he was in "Local Hero."