Screen:
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN SOAPS & DREAMS 'IN THE MORNING' & 'FIELD' See You in the Morning is called a "romantic comedy," but it is really offkey soap, notable only for the acting of Alice Krige (Chariots of Fire,...
...The surprise is the strangeness of what occurs...
...The film, clearly an attempt to ride the home-movie craze, doesn't blossom...
...it's part of Robinson's strategy to preserve mystery by-explaining (almost) nothing...
...But this time it resurrects Jackson, in a com field in contemporary Iowa...
...TOM O'BRIENy...
...You get the feeling Pakula made See You in the Morning for some serious reason...
...and on (Lukas Haas, from Witness) are also compelling...
...and his playfulness with time schemes and a family pet can't hide the thinness of the material...
...Bridges a shrink) has separated from Farah Fawcett (a fashion model), lespite their two children...
...baseball has only recently been colorblind...
...Our faces are almost pressed against it as we watch the farmer (an ex-sixties' radical), Kevin Kostner, weeding it at midsummer...
...Changing this character's skin color in the film is important, yet when Joaes mouths off an embarrassing ode about the all-American goodness of baseball, the film loses an opportunity to add honesty and significance...
...Bridges projects his usual annoying, unreliable energy...
...Not exactly...
...Soon other older ballplayers show up too, all to realize some long frustrated dreams of their own...
...Touching on the race issue, say, by having a Negro League veteran show up in the corn field, could have strengthened the theme of fulfilling frustrated dreams...
...The corn grows tall in the film's first scenes...
...At the New York preview, there wasn't a dry eye left...
...Still, the actors are less to blame than director Alan J. Pakula (Klute,ToKillaMockingbird,AUthePresident'sMen)who3i&o wrote the screenplay...
...It's the kind of film that either nauseates or works on its own terms...
...Field of Dreams, originally titled "Shoeless Joe" after the novel by W. P. Kinsella, is faithful to its source, an exercise in magical realism...
...The movie goes through the motions of predictable infidelities and reconciliations...
...The movie has no real end...
...The real theme of the film isn 't baseball, or America, but sunny summer days spent with loved ones at some ideal house, a pathetic but oh-so-human imagination of heaven...
...of the racy blend of realism and romanticism of Bull Durham...
...Kostner imagines that the voice is telling him to build a ball field over part of his corn...
...But he is also supposed to be an all-knowing observer of others' psyches, and he can't make convincing the combination of boyish nonsense and adult wisdom...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...In the novel, this was apparently J.D...
...No amount of argument is likely to persuade those who dislike the tone, or ostensible subject, baseball in America...
...Would that it were visible...
...Her laughter (Drew Barrymore, more grown up than in E.T...
...But the trio makes only half the tale...
...The voice is never identified (not even on the closing credits...
...Like Eight Men Out it focuses on Shoeless Joe Jackson, one of the Chicago Black Sox of 1919, and one of baseball's all-time beautiful losers...
...Salinger...
...nother baseball movie...
...In Jackson's day, black stars had to compete in the Negro Leagues...
...That story might have yielded something important...
...Haas uses his giant eyes to spark off spooky feelings...
...Social realism isn't required, just honesty...
...Like The Natural, it sees baseball in mythic terms, but happily avoids awful bathos...
...One night a voice whispers to Kostner, "If you build it, he will come...
...And, given recent sports scandals (including the new Pete Rose fuss), more honesty about Joe Jackson's errors in judgment would have been advisable...
...No plot summary can do justice to its texture...
...The "voice" gets Kostner to bring to Iowa a retired sixties' guru and now Boston recluse Terence Mann (James Earl Jones...
...A single plot element illustrates the film's two main problems: hokey exaggeration and unnecessary misrepresentation...
...To the consternation of his neighbors, but not his supportive, spunky wife (Amy Madigan), he goes ahead...
...Krige plays a widow who gets involved with Jeff Bridges, a divorcee...
...Field of Dreams relies on the sport, to be sure, but plays a larger game...
...Director Phil Alden Robinson achieves a hyper-realistic look from the corn: it glows creepily, a clue mat something weird is going to happen...
...It has none of the cheap comedy (cheers...
...he meets Krige, a photographer with wo kids and memories of a pianist husband who killed himself ecause a hand ailment left him unable to play...
...SCREEN SOAPS & DREAMS 'IN THE MORNING' & 'FIELD' See You in the Morning is called a "romantic comedy," but it is really offkey soap, notable only for the acting of Alice Krige (Chariots of Fire, King David...
...Pakula explores nothing deeply...
...Despite rolling my eyes a few times, I wound up thrilled...
...of the current Major League, none (alas...
...Fawcett has only been good when not a glamour girl...
...Lo and behold, the legendary Joe Jackson (Roy Liotta) literally materializes...
...After the ballplayers have left the corn field one last time, Field of Dreams pulls its biggest surprise...
...it just turns visionary...
...Krige jiows how to portray neurotic guilt, and her severe but beau-iful face makes one want to comfort and encourage her...
...The great strength of Field of Dreams is its lack of embarrassment over big things...
...One is perfectly playedby Burt Lancaster, with that bass trumpet voice still a delight to hear...
Vol. 116 • May 1986 • No. 10
