Kevin Costner is Ray Kinsella, an uncertain Iowa corn farmer with a loving wife, cute daughter, big farmhouse, and many acres of land worth $2200 each. And one night, messing around in the corn, it seems to become alien. "If you build it, he will come," whispers a voice. His wife chuckles and dismisses the experience, as do his fellow farmers at the feed store. But this is a fantasy, not a psychiatric case study, and Costner interprets the command to mean, "Mow down half your corn crop and build a baseball field and bleachers in its place." He does so, putting his farm at risk, although things begin to happen. The whole 1916 Chicago White Sox team appears out of the remaining crop and happily begin to play and cuss each other out, all of them ghosts of course. Costner can see them and so can his wife and little girl but the evil mortgage company can't.
Other commands come to Costner, like, "Ease his pain." And "Archie Midnight Graham." They lead him to spend what little cash he has left on a cross-country trip to enlist the reclusive James Earl Jones, as a J. D. Salinger figure, and Burt Lancaster as a failed ball player who became a country doctor and died years ago, so he must be resurrected too, like the baseball players.
It has to do with the fulfillment of dreams, I guess. And Costner has personal issues involving his estrangement from his now deceased father. The musical score, which sounds at times as if it were being played on musical glasses, boosts the already high sentimentality quotient. The viewer's eyes brim with tears as he watches the awe with which the ghosts and the living interact, the long impregnated pauses between lines, while the viewer tries not to cry or to swoon.
Warning: Tea Party types, avoid this. Never mind any regard you have for baseball. There is a confrontation at the PTA meeting between Costner's liberal wife and a "Nazi cow" who wants to ban a novel written years ago by Jones because it's pornographic and the author might be a Commie. Jones, who was at the barricades during the 60s, is held up as a hero who is disillusioned with the past. There are references to "Tricky Dick." Not that the movie is a rabble rouser. Costner's wife's attitudes may be liberal but they're viewer friendly. "Whatever happened to the First Amendment?", she asks the PTA audience. And, "Who wants to spit on the Constitution?" The whole movie at times seems to be aimed at recovering the dreams of the 1960s, not 1916, when the White Sox blew the World Series. The message is, "Never give up your dreams." Try to remember that. One of the problems is that the dreams are already lost. Even the illusions are faded and yellow. Forget baseball and the 1960s. It might as well be, "Remember the Maine".
When I was a child there was only one game, the National Sport, and it was professional baseball. But then our patience (or impatience) evolved. Baseball fans had to sit around during time outs, and wait for the pitcher to check out the bases and pause, then the wind up, then the pitch -- as likely as not, a ball at which the batter did not swing. It required forbearance.
Then professional football replaced the college amateurs. It was faster and more brutal than baseball. Then professional basketball, in which the action is constant. And then professional hockey, a metaphor for war in which the combatants are already armed. Do we have professional cage fighting yet? I forget.
Well, the movie is a fantasy, after all, and isn't meant to evoke Deep Thoughts about the evolution of our national character. The ghosts of various period don't seem to follow any particular rules in their comings and goings. The movie doesn't either. I don't know why James Earl Jones was dragged into the story or why he disappears into the now welcoming corn.
But the casting is nearly perfect. If you want two more gentlemanly types than Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones, you'd have to search the corn fields for them. Even Burt Lancaster has now grown old enough so that his voice, though distinctively his, has a slight gargle and his presence is comforting. And that Iowa farm, with the big white house perched placidly on its knoll, surrounded by what looks like an infinity of leafy forest green, is unforgettably accommodating, as are the many sunsets.
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