Field of Dreams Doesn't Work

The American classic has one glaring oversight

Feb 19, 2025

Field of Dreams has an emotional stranglehold on men of a certain age.

I understand why. It embodies and encourages the better part of our nature and that of America in general. Plus, baseball, for reasons that escape me, is our national pastime.

I regret to inform you, it is not an outstanding movie.

It qualifies as good. But one massive flaw kept me from sharing in the shiny-eyed love for the film that afflicts my father (and millions of others).

I saw it for the first time only a few years ago and was left wondering how this was ever a film.

You Sit on a Throne of LIES

Field of Dreams hit me wrong in a way that, say, Angels in the Outfield, didn’t. Because it's built on a lie.

If you somehow have not seen Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner is a man who's from a city. His father was a minor league baseball player, very distant from him, and died probably younger than he should have. They were estranged.

Kevin Costner (I don’t care about the character’s name and neither do you) moved to Iowa with his lovely and supportive wife. They have a corn farm and they seem to be doing okay. They’re happy.

Kevin Costner is standing in the corn one day and he hears a whispered voice, If you build it, he will come.

This is a mentally well, mentally fit, happy, well-adjusted man who is hearing voices in the corn. When he tells his wife about it, she's perplexed, of course. Everyone would be. Neither of them panic though. They have more of a spirit of exploration about the voice.

In obedience to the voice, Kevin decides to bulldoze his corn, which is the livelihood for his family, and build a baseball diamond. The wife, again, is supportive and says basically some semblance of, “we'll make it work.”

This is okay too, kind of unrealistic, but she's a hippie chick. They both “majored in the 60s” when they went to Berkeley, so some comfort with mystic concepts is to be expected. Their open-mindedness has been established. All right, fine.

The problem comes once the field is built. Once the baseball diamond is erected, these mentally stable people, with no health problems or carbon monoxide leaks in their house, look out the window and see a dead man standing in their new baseball diamond.

Shoeless Joe Jackson, played by the delicious Ray Liotta in the flower of his youth.

They know who this man is. He's not just a stranger. They know it’s Shoeless Joe Jackson, who has been dead for decades. What is the response of this loving and patient wife to seeing a dead man in her yard? She pats her husband on the shoulder and says, “I'll put on some coffee.”

Oh, are you? Is that what you're going to do, ma'am? You're going to put on some coffee for the long-dead baseball player in your corn?

No, I’m sorry, I'm not going to do this with you. And let me tell you why.

A Religion-Shaped Plot Hole

I cannot speculate as to what the original draft of the script involved.

But Kevin Costner's mission in this movie had all the hallmarks of a divine instruction.

If you are of an Abrahamic faith, we believe that God, on occasion, speaks to people and tells them to do things. I would imagine that other faiths also have this, but have no familiarity with eastern traditions.

So if Kevin Costner and his wife had been depicted as devout Christians who believed in divine intervention, and if they had perhaps speculated to one another that this voice was from heaven, it would explain their behavior from soup to nuts. No incongruity to be found.

That would have been rational in terms of the story, but that's not what happened. No mention of faith is made in this movie at all. However, since they were so into the 60s, it’s reasonable to assume they were not religious at all. If they were, it was in name only.

So why did they both immediately obey a voice that speaking from the corn? There's no narrative explanation for this behavior.

None.

It would even have been acceptable if they mentioned a ghost story. “Well, the realtor told us there's long been rumors that people hear voices in the corn telling them to do things,” or something like that.

There has to be some reason why hearing a voice in the corn makes you build a baseball diamond instead of taking your ass to the hospital to get an MRI. It's not reasonable.

And I know what you're thinking. Well, Kristen, if it's fantasy, or if a matter of faith, then it's NOT reasonable. Your logic needs to take a back seat if you believe.

I agree with you. But from the way the story was told, Kevin Costner did NOT believe in anything. He certainly didn't believe in voices with unseen owners giving him instructions, and neither did his wife.

So Field of Dreams, in my opinion, was not a bad movie. I very much enjoyed the emotional payoff at the end. That famous line, “Hey dad, do you want to have a catch?”

We’re a nation full of people who grew up missing their fathers growing up, or even those that didn't, miss them now that they're gone. That payoff was wonderful, the acting was wonderful, the scenery was wonderful, and James Earl Jones is wonderful in everything that he does.

And even that self indulgent monologue he did, which seems ridiculous when the movie's over, works in the moment. You have that verisimilitude, you're in it. It's fine.

But that first leap, that first demand that we suspend our disbelief when Shoeless Joe Jackson is standing in that baseball diamond, for me, falls flat. It wasn't earned. And so even though the rest of the movie works well and was good, if I had gotten the novelized version, I would have had some notes for the client who submitted it.

So my question to you is, especially for my elders, how did you receive this the first time you watched it? Did it make sense to you? I really want to know, because for me, it didn't do the work it needed to.