In the summer of 2001 me and my father went to our first Major League Baseball game together in Arizona. He's in his mid-50's and I was 28 at the time. We watched as the Diamondback's took on the San Francisco Giants. We watched Barry Bonds hit two home runs and the manager of the team being ejected for unsportsman-like conduct. The Diamondbacks ended up winning though, and me and my father cheered and jeered like we gave a damn about either team. Neither of us had ever seen, cared or given two damns about baseball, yet to this date me and my dad treasure that memory as one of the few times we bonded together. Is unlikely that we'll ever go to another baseball game though, since he lives in Arizona and I work in New York City. Plus we really don't like baseball all that much and we don't get along too well with each other, if you know what I mean.

I'm sure that you all have your own particular memories about baseball, father-son relationships and/or meditations about what we all wish we could have said or done to long-lost relatives that are no longer with us. That's what makes Phil Alden Robinson's "Field of Dreams" the quintessential American movie for all three of those subjects, and one of the most subtle and gentle star vehicles with which actor Kevin Costner became associated with the way Hollywood portrays the sport in movies (along with Sam Raimi's "For Love of Game" and Ron Shelton's "Bull Durham"). Costner plays Ray Kinsella, life-long baseball fanatic and hard-working Iowa farmer that's married to lovely Annie (Amy Madigan) and is father to a cute little daughter named Karin (little Gaby Hoffman). Life couldn't be more simple or uncomplicated for Ray until he hears in his corn field a mysterious voice telling him: 'If you build it, he will come'. With the support of his wife and the perpetual ridicule of his brother-in-law (played with sarcastic delight by "Thirtysomething" star Timothy Busfield), Ray builds a baseball field in the middle of his corn field.

Then, a few nights into his madness, a player from the scandalous White Sox team that threw away the World Series in the early part of the century appears in the Kinsella's new baseball field. He's 'Shoeless' Joe Jackson (a pre-"Goodfellas" Ray Liota), and his baseball friends also come over to play at Ray's. Through chance, circumstance and a lot of coincidence (not to mention a tremendous leap of faith by the screenplay that Phil Alden Robinson adapted from W.P.Kinsella's "Shoeless Joe" novel), Ray decides to use his field's magical ability to draw baseball players from the past to correct the lives of men that loved the sport but weren't able to fully explore their ability to play the sport. One of them is author Terence Mann (James Earl Jones) that parallels the career of "Catcher on the Rie" author J.D.Salinger, and another one is a small-town doctor named Archie 'Moonlight' Graham (played by Burt Lancaster as an old man and Frank Whaley as a young man) that only played once in the majors and then disappeared into a life of normalcy.

The interaction between these disparate characters, held together by Costner's no-nonsense performance and the measured direction by Phil Robinson (the man behind this summer's Ben Affleck/Morgan Freeman flick "The Sum Of All Fears"), carries "Field of Dreams" through story-telling loopholes that could have sunk a lesser film. The payoff at the end is both humane, poetic and intellectual, while also being subversively funny as a contrast to the money-making machinery that the sport of baseball has become in contemporary times. Magical and spellbinding, "Field of Dreams" is a sports movie that transcends its sports niche appeal and becomes a comment on man's most basic desires. Irresistible summer-viewing entertainment.