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 [Larger view] | The Field
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 The Field | |
| Hello, Jeff Shannon? Were you asleep when you watched parts of this film? What did YOU fail to emotionally connect with?
Perhaps you missed the struggle between father and son? Of the Irish with Engish? and the Catholic monopoly? Class distinction, oppression, and STRUGGLE? If you have a soul, you will connect deeply with this film. It resonates on many levels. | |
| A Rock and a Hard Place | |
| THE FIELD never forgets the Irish famine which took perhaps a million lives and cast its people across the seas, their population dropping from 8 to 5 million. As a class, the McCabes, farm labourers, were all but wiped out. What is the field, but their bodies, a people so poor, so exploited, and abandoned that many were left were they fell. In other ways, it was an awakening. It was a blight that destroyed the major food crop of the people -- a blight precipitated by destructive farming methods, concentration of landholding, dehumanizing racial and religious prejudice; in sum, the general economic rape of a land and people by an imperial overlord.
Please see this movie. See it as a tale for our own time. Bull McCabe is indeed a man between a rock and hard place. How do we forgive? How can we find a way to peace, to justice? How to serve the dead and the living? So many rocks and hard places in The Field. Like the Irish, it has the complexity and fatalism of the ancient Greeks. Did I mention the acting? Richard Harris is perfect. Amazing. Sean Bean too, as ever. But to watch John Hurt eat that sandwich is worth dying for. It's a heartbreaker -- and a joy knowing that such creatures exist to break our hearts. | |
 "I got a terrible rapping in me skull." | |
| Though this film, directed by Jim Sheridan, is based on the stage play of the same name by John B. Keane, it bears little resemblance to the play. The play emphasizes the passion of a Kerry farmer for his land, the measures he takes to protect it, and the willingness of the community to support him, evading both the law and the church to achieve "true" justice. Big Bull McCabe, fighting to buy land he has leased and improved for ten years, is portrayed as embodying the attitudes of the whole Kerry farming culture and not as a completely unique individual with unique problems.
The film, however, changes the emphasis, introducing many new elements for their visual effects. Bull McCabe (passionately played by Richard Harris) must outbid a crass American (not an Englishman) for the field. The dandified American (Tom Berenger) wants to use the limestone in the hills to create a cement factory (not to build a home for his Irish wife) and to use the nearby waterfall for a hydroelectric plant. Widow Maggie Butler (Frances Tomelty) is selling the land because she is tired of her harrassment by Bull's son Tadgh (Sean Bean) and his friends (a new, illustrated subplot). Bird O'Donnell, a nearly toothless and somewhat daft stereotype (John Hurt) is a gawping comic foil for the passion of McCabe here. Traditional, folksy dances and community activities, the developing love story of Tadgh and a gypsy girl, the close friendship between the American buyer and the pompous local priest (Sean McGinley), the death of McCabe's other son many years before, and the involvement of McCabe's wife in the film's resolution are all new, visual plot elements, and the ending is totally different, both in the way the action is "resolved" and in its thematic message. Spectacular cinematography (Jack Conroy)--fog, wind, cliffs, and rain--emphasizes the greatness of the land and the relative smallness of man, while the simple music (Elmer Bernstein) adds to the mood and highlights the dramatic action. Dialogue, often limited to cryptic comments, is subordinated to visual information, and the pub characters, including the pub owner, a major character in the play, are almost interchangeable in their stereotypes. Symbolism is obvious, from Bull's blowing of a dandelion to illustrate "what we'd be without the land," to his crucifixion pose near the end of the film. The stark realism of the play and the power of the "us vs. them" community dynamic get lost with the film's personal focus on Bull McCabe--and its melodrama. Mary Whipple |
