Review of the Movie of the Field Full
"The Field" is a grim allegory of hard life on the land - a symbolic play, transplanted uneasily to the greater realism of the film medium, where what we might accept on the stage at present looks contrived and artificial. This was non a work that called out to be filmed. Once filmed, information technology calls out to be forgotten. But information technology will always accept a footnote in cinematic history, because Richard Harris' work has been nominated for an University Honour in the all-time thespian category.
Harris plays "Bull" McCabe, a weathered and bearded man of the soil, who has spent a lifetime disposed a small field in his corner of Republic of ireland. The time is the 1920s, but it could exist the 1820s for all that life has changed in this soggy and clouded backwater, where the miserable McCabe and his retarded son, Tad, haul wicker baskets full of seaweed up the cruel cliffs and dump them on the field, every bit their fathers and the fathers of their fathers have done earlier them. Then a slick Irish-American (Tom Berenger) comes to town, smoking cigarettes and wearing a camel-hair overcoat, and he wants to buy the field, in order to strip-mine information technology, I retrieve.
His arrival inevitably precipitates a crisis in the hamlet, which tin can merely exist settled by rape, murder and a public sale, accompanied by no end of wise epigrams past the wizened local inhabitants, who have been waiting a generation for their adventure to mutter profound sayings about the land and the people who alive on't. Harris growls and howls and looks like Lear as he wades about in the bitter bounding main and strides through the mud and peat, and there is no doubting this is a good performance, but in the service of a hopeless cause.
If I were watching this as a play, I might just exist able to care nigh the field, if information technology were located far offstage. But the motion picture photographic camera has an unforgiving way of photographing anything that is put before information technology, then we can hands meet that the McCabes, begetter and son and father's father and all, have been wasting their efforts dragging that moisture seaweed up the cliff to fertilize the field, considering the village is surrounded by thousands of acres of prime pasturage. Tom Berenger is also on a fool's errand. Why does he need to strip the field when if there is one thing the district has more of than fields, it is mineral rights, and if there is one thing it has no need of, information technology is gravel? No, this play is non about the field, information technology is most eternal questions. Questions almost (ane) a man's right to the land, (two) whether the owner should sell out to the highest bidder and (three) whether the Irish in America accept lost their respect for the country and its people, and forgotten the one-time means. The answer to these questions, laid out hither in dirge and lamentation, is that (ane) if a man and his male parent and his father's begetter spend their lifetime dragging seaweed upward a cliff and dumping it on the state, they have, by God, a right to that land, (2) the possessor should therefore sell it at a loss, or give it away, and (3) yes.
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Dominicus-Times from 1967 until his decease in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
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The Field (1991)
107 minutes
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