The film that makes me cry: Field of Dreams

I first saw Field of Dreams on 25 December 1993, on ITV. My father had died on 11 January 1992. If you want to, you can stop reading now, because you don’t have to be a psychologist to work out why Field of Dreams made me cry.

I was 22 when Dad died, he was 52. I was six months out of university, living at home, and I’d just started working as a journalist. We hadn’t had a chance to get to know each other as adults, and, because of his shyness and quietness, I’d never really developed the sense of him as a person in his own right: he was just Dad, the person who went to work to pay the mortgage, then came home to listen to his records and read and reread and rereread his Trollope novels.

We both loved football, we were both passionate about music, but we were at our closest, probably, over film. In those far-off days when films took years to come to TV, and the Christmas schedules would be full of stuff the terrestrial channels had saved up to premiere – like Field of Dreams in 1993 – as well as seasons of the great directors and actors, he and I would watch the best films on TV together. He got me watching Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola and Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut. He let me develop the space to have my opinions about films – he scoffed at my conviction that Heaven’s Gate, in its long form, was one of the best films ever made, but he liked the fact that at least I had the conviction, I think. I don’t know: this was all a long time ago, and memory plays tricks, not least when it comes to defining one’s relationship to one’s family.

What I am certain of is that he would have dismissed Field of Dreams, as did so many critics when it was released in 1989. In the New Yorker, Pauline Kael swatted it aside as “a crock … the opening salute of the Bush era”; Time called it “the male weepie at its wussiest”; the Nation said “it gives wish fulfilment a bad name”. Field of Dreams, I can’t deny, is trite and sentimental; it’s deeply conservative, not just in its conception of a heartland America, but also in its vision of the innocence of the past (the ghostly baseball players who materialise from the 1980s corn, the disgraced Chicago White Sox of 1919, are themselves trying to return to a prelapsarian state). And – in the most materialistic way imaginable for a film that’s ostensibly spiritual – it has the crass message that there’s always money to be made from following your dream. But that first time I saw it, sitting on my mum’s sofa, it made me weep.

When Kevin Costner builds the baseball diamond on the cornfields of his Iowa farm, he thinks he’s building it to answer the needs of those baseball players, especially “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, the baseball great who was brought low by the fixing of the 1919 World Series, giving rise to the myth of the young boy who begged of him outside the courtroom: “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

The truth is that Costner’s character, Ray Kinsella, isn’t building the diamond for the players. He’s building it for his late father, who appears as a young man at the end of the film to fulfil his dream of playing with the Sox – and to give Kinsella the chance to play catch with the father he never resolved his relationship with.

There’s no way to write that down without making sound like the most enormous heap of hokum. You can almost smell the manure coming off the page. But it opened the floodgates for me. It wasn’t that there was conflict in my relationship with Dad; it was the knowledge that he had died before he knew who I was, or I knew who he really was. The conclusion of Field of Dreams didn’t suddenly bring home to me my loss; it made me acutely aware that I was never going to be able to add colour and detail to the shadow figure that was my father. I would never have that moment of playing catch. I would never know his dreams and disappointments.

I wasn’t alone. Despite the mixed reviews, Field of Dreams became a hit, and – incredibly – a self-fulfiling prophecy. The film had been shot on a farm in Dyersville, Iowa, and after the film-makers left, the farmers who owned the land maintained the baseball diamond. People who had been touched by the film came on their own pilgrimages to the site, though with a certain grim inevitability it was never as pure and simple as one might hope: the diamond had actually been built across two farms, and the two families operated their separate parts of the field with different tourist facilities, and argued about the ongoing commercialisation of the site.

More than 20 years later, Field of Dreams doesn’t have the same effect on me, though films in which a father dies leaving an unresolved relationship with his son can still surprise me by overwhelming me with emotion. October Sky, another piece of rural American sentiment, left me in floods of tears. I sometimes fear all it takes is for a boy to look sadly at his father and I’ll be weeping.

I have my own children now, growing older. These days I’m a father more than a son, and the stories that resonates with me are of one generation trying to reconcile itself with the one that follows, those of parents trying to understand their children, attempting to navigate the ocean between the blissful child who wanted hugs and love and silliness and the stroppy teenager who just wants to be left alone for fear of being embarrassed.

But I hope that one day my children will watch something that reminds them of me, and think – well, at this point I can’t stretch to lovingly – fondly of me, as I do of my own father when I see the sun setting over the Iowa corn.