James Earl Jones, Kevin Costner and Amy Madigan in Field of Dreams.Supplied
There is no more pleasant way to start a fight than to tell a man which is the best sports movie.
Throughout the course of celluloid history, no two people have ever agreed on this. As soon as you say yours, the other guy has to gazump you with some obscurity no one watches any more.
Yeah, sure, you’re spending a lazy Tuesday night unwinding with a repeat viewing of Bang the Drum Slowly. Great movie, but I have my doubts.
The problem is that everyone’s favourite sports movie is uncool. It’s something you saw when you were a child. It’s something sickly sweet or emotionally manipulative or both. It’s something you watch by yourself on the Blu-Ray you got the week it was released and don’t talk about.
Which brings us around to James Earl Jones.
Jones, 93, died Monday after a remarkable life. Reading his obits, this man did it about as right as you can. From Arkabutla, Miss., to the U.S. Army to Broadway to receiving a standing O at the Academy Awards. That’s an American story. Jones was so smart that he got to play Darth Vader without having to bother wedging himself into latex.
But the pinnacle of Jones’s career is the hour or so he spends on-screen in the greatest sports film of all time, Field of Dreams.
Field of Dreams has everything. It’s a road movie, an American pastoral and a real-estate thriller before that was a thing.
It stars Kevin Costner as a diffident suburban dad working mostly in voiceover, thereby nullifying Costner’s inability to act. It’s got culture war stuff, but the kind from back in the day when we all agreed we are on the same side and that none of it really mattered much anyway. It’s got baseball, but not too much baseball, since the best sports movies know not to show a lot of sports. Costner gets top billing, but (with all due respect to Burt Lancaster) Jones is the engine of the movie. He’s the convert. He’s the one who goes to heaven.
The big moment in the movie comes near the end when Costner delivers the line, “Hey Dad, you wanna have a catch?”
The crux of a sports movie is redemption. If it doesn’t have redemption, then it’s not a sports movie. It’s just a movie with sports.
A great sports movie features a redemption so shattering that it can elicit tears from the stoniest, least-in-touch-with-his-feelings man you know. Maybe your dad.
If you’re worried about boys and how they’re adapting to a changing society, stop talking at them about it. Show them Field of Dreams. That movie is a more effective course in masculinity than any conversation about it, usually led by someone who has no idea what being a man is like.
The redemption of Costner’s character is obvious – he hated baseball as a child, so much so that he refused to play catch with his dad. Now, thanks to a magical Iowan baseball field that is some sort of resurrection machine, he can do that.
But Jones’s redemption is the one you find yourself marinating in after repeated viewings. He’s the cultish novelist who has given up worldly things and retreated to a loft apartment I still think about at least once a week. If I had a loft like that …
Everyone knows how this character should be played – weird. He’s J.D. Salinger. He’s an irritable crank convinced of his own genius who’s used to being deferred to. He’s there to be pitied.
Instead, Jones imbues the character with a radiating rage that refuses to allow the film to become a buddy comedy.
Jones doesn’t get many lines, but he takes control. He decides he will go to the Red Sox game. He decides he will go along on Costner’s goofy quest. He does all the hard journalistic work of figuring out who’s who and what’s what. He’s in charge the whole way.
When I first saw this movie as a teenager, I figured that Costner’s character – the guy who risks ridicule by plowing over his own fields to build the diamond – is the hero. Now that I’m middle aged, I realize that Jones is the central character.
Because Costner’s Ray is driven by religious zeal. He isn’t making rational choices. But Jones’s Terrence Mann is a man willing to recalibrate everything he’s ever thought in the face of new, extremely-hard-to-believe evidence.
Jones isn’t a just a man. He’s a perfected man. But unlike most perfected men in movies, he’s not a cartoon. He’s a real, attainable person.
You too can become Jones’s Terrence Mann. Stand up for what you believe and be willing to adapt. Never lose that childlike ability to become something else.
People go on and on about this or that role and how the actor embodies the character (Al Pacino in any movie continues to baffle me). What Jones managed in Field of Dreams is factors better. He didn’t just act in the movie. He was rewriting the intention of the character with every gesture and look and, most especially, inflection of that famous voice, and in so doing making it better.
In the fullness of time, your cultural life will be reduced to a few inputs. There is a time limit on this. Nothing you read or see or hear after your middle teens is ever going to hit you the way it could when you were a kid. Those were the books, songs and movies that made you you. Everything after is ornamenting a foundation.
At the time in your life when you are looking around for guidance about how to be – how to sound, how to act, where to put your hands when someone else is talking to you – movies teach you that. Most of us have more Michael Caine or Denzel Washington in us than we’d care to admit.
Every time I see Field of Dreams again – and I watch it all the time – I see something new in Jones’s portrayal that I can use or learn.
It’s the greatest sports film of all time in part because Jones – who was 58 when it was released and doesn’t play an athlete – was teaching millions of teenage boys who saw it how to be in the world.