THE MIGHTY BEAN

In our over-urbanized society, where space and privacy are at a premium, "The Field" plays as something of an escapist tragedy, being about one man's attachment to his land and, through it, to the elemental forces within his own nature.

The setting is rural Ireland, on the rugged but beautiful, underpopulated western coast, and the time, to judge from the clothes and the automobiles, the 1930's. The year is never stated. It could be any time, the better to evoke a sense of myth to match the kind of story it is.

"The Field," written and directed by Jim Sheridan ("My Left Foot"), is about a grandly photogenic old man named Bull McCabe (Richard Harris) and his grandly photogenic undoing. It opens today at the Murray Hill Cinemas.

Like his father, and his father's father before him, Bull has nurtured one patch of the barren landscape into a small field that supports sheep and cattle enough to support his family. Unfortunately for them, the McCabes do not own the land. They rent it.

Life is not easy. Bull and his son Tadgh (Sean Bean) work sunup to sundown. It's made no easier by the fact that Bull and his wife, Maggie (Brenda Fricker), have not spoken for 18 years. There is a mystery in their past, which has to do with an older son who died, but that isn't talked about until the middle of what might be Act III.

"The Field" is a movie that all too often reveals its origins as a play (by John B. Keane). It is sincere and symmetrical and full of references to primal passions that evoke the tougher but less anxious times of long ago. It's a sorrowful fable that depends a lot on one's susceptibility to sorrowful fables about primal passions.

Mr. Sheridan and his cast clearly respond from the heart. Mr. Harris, looking a lot like Michelangelo's God (but less weatherbeaten), gives a big, actory performance as Bull at that moment in his life when all comes crashing down around him. "God made the world, but we made the field," Bull tells Tadgh with pride, shortly before his fall. It's as if he and God were separate but equal.

A few days later, the field's owner, a widow, sells it at auction to a young American (Tom Berenger), who plans to pave it over and do other crass things in the cause of commerce.

The local priest is no help but then, as Bull notes, "no priests died in the time of the famine." Says the priest to the American, "It's just a thin veneer of Christianity we've painted over these people."

Bull tries to reason with the interloper, but unsuccessfully, leading to an operatic finale.

"The Field" is a very small story that aspires to large poetic significance. It is full of atmosphere: swirling fog, great storm clouds, torrential rains and other elemental things, including mud.

The faces of the people in the town pub are authentic and hard bitten. Beginning with Mr. Harris's, the faces of the professional actors never quite fit in. No matter how sincere they feel, they all look like actors, including Miss Fricker, who won an Oscar for her much more effective performance in "My Left Foot."

The usually fine John Hurt acts up a storm of his own, but even he never seems indigenous to this landscape. He plays the town gofer, a fellow not all there in the head, a variation on the role played with fewer teeth by John Mills in David Lean's somewhat more romantic "Ryan's Daughter."

Mr. Berenger gives a decent performance as the American, but he's not on screen very long.

Source: N.Y. Times