The Field is the second film directed by Jim Sheridan and falls among his brilliant early works such as My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father. The film, based on a play by John B. Keane, takes place in an Irish village in 1920s. It focuses on the life of "Bull McCabe" and his efforts to buy the field that he works on. His family has lived for generations in this village and he wants to leave the field as his legacy to his son, and his son after him, and so on. As a hardworking and honest man, we come to admire him. But things take a turn for worse when the field becomes more important than anything for him, even more important than himself. And he fights fiercely to get the field, without considering what this fight might cost him and his family. His traditional thinking is also challenged by the appearance of a rich American, who has returned to him homeland to buy the lands and begin a major industry there.Richard Harris, who plays Bull McCabe, was nominated for an Oscar while John Hurt was also nominated for BAFTA for playing "Bird" in the film.

I found this movie riveting up until the last 20 minutes or so. After the priest closes the gates to the church, the rest of it degenerates into a poor attempt at Greek tragedy, with Bull having everything stripped from him. There was no need to destroy the man further after losing Tadgh to the Tinker girl and pushing away his wife's one last attempt at reconciliation. Nothing was gained artistically in my view, and that part of the plot made little sense.For example, the body of the American was picked up from a lake just outside Bull's house (the image of the American hanging from the hook and the echo with Shamey's hanging brilliantly suggests all the guilt Bull must be feeling). Along with the donkey's carcass even if it's not proof Bull did the murder, he should have been held for questioning given everything else. Instead, he is allowed to freely walk around and get himself into further trouble.Little things also got in the way for me. For one, the field was just too small, both to support Bull or to support a mill to grind limestone into roadbed. The herd of Bull's cattle he was driving at the end was just too large for the field to feed, and no single man on foot could have driven them a long distance over rocky ground to the edge of a cliff (not to mention previous scenes had shown the path between the field and the sea did not go through the village). Nobody who had ever grown up around cattle such as Tadgh would ever think to get in front of a stampede, even in grief. It would be like someone who grew up in a city jumping in front of a locomotive running at a high speed to stop someone on the train. It just isn't done unless you are suicidal and I don't think Tadgh was at that point. As someone who is actually familiar with that kind of life, director Sheridan's lack of attention to detail suggests someone who really didn't understand farming or who ultimately only really cared about the psychodrama at the story's center. As a result, he only did an adequate job of fleshing out the play into a movie.Still, the acting was excellent throughout as was Sheridan's direction of the actors. The dark layers underneath Bull's life and family were expertly stripped away as the movie progressed. It was a little like seeing the Irish version of "Long Day's Journey into Night". As someone who grew up on a farm, I understand Bull's love/hate relationship with land that he has worked for decades. It really is like raising another member of the family, and no other movie I can think of has ever shown this better than the moving speech Bull gives at one point (I have to wonder if this speech is a carryover from the original play given Sheridan's missteps in showing farming). And the depiction of the grinding poverty of rural Ireland, the entanglement of ancient wrongs on current family lives, and the ambiguous relationship Bull had with the Church all were in accord with my readings of Irish history (and this is an area in which I'm sure Sheridan and playwright Keane are expert).

From my point of view this was an absolutely awful film. That is not saying that it wasn't executed competently and the stellar cast ceratinly perfromed well. However, what makes this film so bad is the scrrenplay. The author simply uses stereotypes from the classic Irish literature with its focus on rural life, tradition and poverty. From a certain point onwards that made Irish literature provincial and at times hardly bearable before the arrival of a modern Irish urban literature. So this film just adds stereotype to stereotype and strings it together to an uninspired story relying heavily on Irish foklore. All ingredients are there: the dominant father, love of the lamd, immigration to America, family conflict and lots of landscape.

"The Field": Starring 1990 Oscar Nominee for Best Actor Richard Harris, Sean Bean, John Hurt, Brenda Fricker, Frances Tomelty, and Tom Berenger. This is the stuff of the Epics. Think novels with the Hugeness of Vision by Thomas Hardy, John Steinbeck, or Herman Melville; the Tales of the Greeks or Shakespeare; and the operas of Wagner. HUGE visions. All of this is hidden in a little story about an Irishman who rents a 3 acre plot of land? It only stays hidden for so long. Richard Harris is fantastic as an aging man who feels disconnected to all but "his" beautiful, green, beloved (leased) plot of land, which was worked by his father before him and his father before him. Alas, his son (Sean Bean) seems hesitant to carry it on. If that isn't bad enough for a man who sees nothing as more important than tradition and love for the land, along comes an American (Tom Berenger) with a whole new idea for this property, and soon makes the legal owner an offer of purchase. The little story becomes bigger – then Bigger – and BIGGER – all the way to HUGE. It has a straight-ahead, linear movement that not only seems to imply warnings, but unstoppable Karma. Like all good Epics, it is full of lessons – about vice, virtue, evil, wisdom, warnings, tragedy, potential redemption, and reminders about what is good & bad, right & wrong, fair & unfair. You'll also love the landscapes.