Live Life Team
This is a film adaptation of the heart-warming story of Ray Kinsella, a city-boy turned farmer, who keeps hearing voices from the past who want him to build a baseball diamond in the middle of his Iowa cornfield. Considering the family is under serious financial pressure, this idea isn’t going over too well, especially since the voice Kinsella is hearing is none other than that of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, a disgraced member of the 1919 Chicago Black Sox – the team that threw the World Series.
Yet, “Shoeless” tells Ray that if he builds the field it will help to ease the pain he’s been living with as a result of having been estranged from his now dead father. “If you build it, he will come,” “Shoeless” tells Ray, so Ray goes ahead and constructs the baseball diamond, complete with elaborate floodlights and bleacher seating, right in the middle of his cornfield.
Throughout the film Ray is visited by baseball players of the past, and only those who believe can see them, out in the cornfield, playing the game from a bygone era, the greats and the nearly greats.
The film culminates when Ray finally meets his own now dead father out in the cornfield, and has a tearful reconciliation with him.
You don’t have to be a baseball fan to enjoy this film. In fact, I know little about baseball, nor do I care for the sport. But this film is not about baseball. It’s about what can happen if one believes and if one truly seeks to purge feelings of anger and isolation that have long since taken root in his soul.
This film is a must see.
