Field of Dreams

I just finished crying. No, it wasn't a bad cry. It was a good, cathartic cry. The cry I have everytime the long dead John Kinsella approaches his son Ray to thank him for giving them a place to play, inquiring "Is this heaven?"

A lot of people mistake Field of Dreams for a baseball movie. But it's oh so much more. It's a movie about lost opportunity and how far we'd go to get just one moment in time back. It is a movie that uses baseball as a metaphore. Unlike most baseball movies about redemption, Ray Kinsella isn't redeemed by baseball...he uses it to redeem himself.

Tonites showing on AMC was accompanied by little blurbs about the movie...and about how all things seemed to fall together magically to make it the movie it became. Based on WP Kinsella's first novel, Shoeless Joe, the studio decided to change the name to Field of Dreams to disassociate it from baseball. Amazingly enough, WP Kinsella hadn't wanted to call his book Shoeless Joe at all. His title for it was "The Dream Field".

When things so magically move into place, you know something special has occurred. Field of Dreams is the sort of movie that makes you feel so good at the end that you seemingly become redeemed right along with Ray.

The Field of Dreams is still there in the cornfields of Iowa, still working its magic nearly two decades after the mystical movie filmed there. For some, its a place of joy, allowing them to relive moments long gone in time. For others, it's a place to make peace with their past, to find what Ray and John Kinsella found on a cinema screen so long ago.

It's a rare occurrance...when the movie gods smile down and create something as special as this beautiful, gentle movie.

"Is this heaven?"

"No. It's Iowa."