Bovie Movie

Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella hears a voice in his corn field tell him, “If you build it, he will come.” He interprets this message as an instruction to build a baseball field on his farm, upon which appear the ghosts of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the other seven Chicago White Sox players banned from the game for throwing the 1919 World Series. When the voices continue, Ray seeks out a reclusive author to help him understand the meaning of the messages and the purpose for his field.

A feminist farm belt version of William Shakespeare’s King Lear, this film is based on Jane Smiley’s novel about an aging farmer and his three daughters. The Lear-like farmer, Larry Cook (Jason Robards), decides to divide up his thousand-acre farm among his three daughters, but he disinherits his youngest, Caroline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), an attorney, when she expresses hesitancy. The other sisters, Ginny (Jessica Lange) and Rose (Michelle Pfeiffer), take up the offer, even though they were sexually abused by their father as children. They also take up romantically with the hippie son of a neighboring farmer, Jess Clark (Colin Firth), after their own drunken, demented father moves out to live with Clark’s father Harold (Pat Hingle). When Rose’s husband Peter (Kevin Anderson) learns of her betrayal, he gets drunk, crashes his truck, and dies. Ginny’s husband Ty (Keith Carradine) enlists Caroline’s help and sues Ginny and Rose on behalf of their father, whom he feels has been treated badly by the daughters.

Truman Capote wrote the ‘non-fiction novel’ from which the film is drawn, using the novelist’s craft to render reality. The reality was that at two a.m. on November 15, 1959 in the rural town of Holcomb, Kansas, the four members of the Clutter family were roused from their sleep, bound and gagged, and then brutally murdered by two unknown assailants. After the latters’ capture, sentencing and imprisonment prior to execution, Capote researched the case thoroughly, spent weeks talking with the prisoners, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, jurors, police, friends and neighbors, trying to unearth why such a senseless act was committed, and what society’s response might have been.