This is very much not great cinema but it’s so well known and so deeply embedded in popular culture, that I felt that I had to watch it for completionist reasons. This is after all the origin of the phrase, “build it and they will come” though the film actually says he will come. Surprisingly the phrase turns up quite often in the field of economics, such as when people argue that building infrastructure even in the middle of seemingly nowhere will be enough to spark an economic boom.

Ray Kinsella moves to Iowa to start a farm with his young family despite not knowing much about farming at all. Out in the fields he hears a mysterious voice telling him ‘build it and he will come’ but no one else can hear it. As he has vast knowledge of baseball due to his father being a huge fan of the sport and a failed Minor Leagues player, he interprets this to mean that he has to build a baseball field on his land. After convincing his wife that he feels the need to dare to chase after dreams, he does so despite the fact that this makes their financial situation precarious. Sure enough the deceased baseball player Shoeless Joe Jackson appears on the field and thanks Ray. He also mentions that plenty of other long dead players would like to come and play again and after getting Ray’s permission, they appear on the field the next day. Yet this proves to be only the beginning of these mysterious tasks for Ray as the voice speaks to him again, this time saying ‘ease his pain”.

As I knew that this was a film about a possibly crazy guy building a baseball field in the middle of nowhere, I thought the completion of the field itself would be the climax with the whole thing being about him overcoming various obstacles along the way. So I was quite surprised to see that the field is finished about fifteen minutes into the film and there is a whole lot more going on here. In effect, Ray Kinsella acts a lot like Sam Beckett of Quantum Leap intervening to fulfill the missed aspirations of various people connected with baseball. With how it seems to hearken back to a Golden Age of baseball that once united America, it’s also reminiscent of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, especially with its magical realism. I confess that this feels very odd to me as I’m not a sports fan at all and of course know nothing about baseball. Yet this film not only aptly demonstrates that there are people out there who are absolutely devoted to it, but they attribute to it a cultural significance and meaning that is in no way inferior to that of Allen’s intellectuals, philosophers and artists of fin de siècle Paris.

I can’t quite agree of course as it seems to me that this is a case of the fans projecting an immense quantity of passion and enthusiasm into something that at its heart is just not that rich in the first place. It doesn’t help either that production quality is only about average. This isn’t a particularly beautiful or visually striking film. Then there’s the fact that this film has aged poorly. Baseball now occupies an ever dwindling mindshare of the American cultural landscape which make bombastic statements in the film about how only it can unify America feel rather silly. I’m also always leery of holding up sportsmen of any stripe as personal heroes as if there is any connection between sports ability and personal virtue. All this is married to personal stories of individual regret and second chances. I’m usually dismissive of stories that bank on sentimentalism but here it’s done with enough earnestness and honesty that it’s hard not to at least crack a smile. I’m not exactly sold on it but I am willing to give it a pass.

Overall this film surprised me with how much more there is to it than I’d imagined and how seriously it takes the mythos of baseball heroes. I have to admit that it is endearing and rather pleasant to watch but it is still not really a good film. I am happy to have finally watched it so that I know what that famous phrase really means and the other cultural references to it.