Can't Be Bothered

In a way, it was unfair since I knew how Clare would react—part shark, Old Faithful and Mt. Vesuvius.  “Here,” I said after Easter dinner, “read this,” a reassessment of the movie “Field of Dreams.”  Wait for it, just wait, now:  “Why did you have me read this?”  Just toying with you, child.

 

Paul Newberry, an AP writer, must have run out of column ideas, so he decided to pick on this now 30-year old classic starring Kevin Costner, James Earl Jones and Burt Lancaster.  Newberry wasn’t buying any talk of baseball or FOD being “some sort of timeless metaphor for connecting to your past and understanding what America is really all about.”  No, sirree.  “In reality, it’s just another terrible film.”

 

Outside of noting how the movie avoids any mention of baseball’s color line, Newberry doesn’t offer much in the way of substantive criticism.  Oh, wait, he thinks Roy Liotta as Shoeless Joe Jackson was trying out his wise-guy persona that would inform “Goodfellas” a year later.  Now, most fair-minded critics of FOD have a different problem with Liotta’s portrayal of Shoeless Joe, playing him right-handed while the real Jackson threw and hit lefty.  Oh, well, by his own admission Newberry says he belongs to a group commonly known as “lazy sportswriters.”  Indeed.

 

What I really didn’t like was his recommendation of “Bull Durham,” what he considers a Costner baseball movie “with some entertainment value.”  Oh, really?  Because we all want our daughters to grow up and be baseball Annies or that’s how we ought to see women in general?  Thanks, but no thanks.

For me, it’s not so much the what of “Field of Dreams” as the where, that converted cornfield outside of Dyersville, Iowa.  We took Clare there twice, the second time when she was twelve and had just hit her first moonshot of a homerun, this in Bronco baseball.  I’d brought along a bucket of baseballs and proceeded to pitch a little BP to my daughter; she nearly took my head off on one line drive.  The ball rolled nearly to the corn, and I think I saw a hand reach out and try to take it.