What a load of hogwash. Robert Redford’s new film as a director, The Legend of Bagger Vance, is about a golfer who has such terrible experiences during World War I that it quite puts him off his game. He loses his swing, as they appear to say in golfing parlance. Then, some time later, with the help of a mystical black caddie, he gets it back.
Matt Damon plays Rannulph Junuh, the golfer in question – blond and square-jawed, like one of his main golfing opponents in the movie, he rather reminds one of a younger Redford, as did Brad Pitt in A River Runs Through It. This appears to be one of Redford the director’s chief cinematic techniques. That and golden, syrupy cinematography, allied to golden, syrupy sentiment.
The Legend of Bagger Vance is set in Savannah, Georgia, during the Depression. Junuh’s estranged wife Adele, played by Charlize Theron, puts together a golf tournament to save her late father’s golf course, and seems to change outfits practically with every shot. Junuh is persuaded out of boozy retirement to join the match; a 10-year-old golfing fan, Hardy (J Michael Moncrief), encourages him to relive his glory days and save Savannah from humiliation. The movie is narrated in retrospect by Hardy as an old man (Jack Lemmon), and there is so much voice-over that it could probably pass muster as a radio play.
What makes all the difference to Junuh getting his swing back is the presence of Bagger Vance, a mysterious but permanently grinning black man who strolls out of the night and starts giving Junuh advice. The fact that, at a time when racism was still rife in the South, an intinerant black man is caddying for Junuh during the match (which takes up the second half of the movie and seems to last as long as the three-day tournament), giving him tips and pep-talks in an intimately chummy way, does not strike anyone as odd.
Maybe they didn’t realise he was black; certainly, as so often with Smith’s roles, his blackness seems irrelevant. Which is mostly fine, but in the South in the Thirties? The other black people in the movie, at any rate, are drinking, card-playing, trumpet-toting negroes; one expects a joshing, cajoling mammy to bustle in bearing a plate of hominy grits.
But Bagger Vance, in the person of Will Smith, giving a performance even more insufferably smug than Johnny Depp’s in Chocolat, is doing the joshing and cajoling here. Junuh keeps changing his mind about playing, and keeps yet again mislaying that pesky swing, and Bagger keeps having to give him more pep-talks, offering endless portentous insights about golf. ”Feel that focus,” he says. ”There’s only one shot there in perfect harmony with the field,” he says. When you find that ”authentic shot”, he says, ”everything that is becomes one … You got to seek that place with your soul.” What next? Will Smith as the Dalai Lama?
Golf as a metaphor for life is as tiresome as baseball, football or any other sport as a metaphor for life. What makes The Legend of Bagger Vance particularly annoying is that it seems to be proposing life as a metaphor for golf. One leaves the cinema feeling that, even more so than with most big-budget Hollywood movies, humanity’s real existential dilemmas have been expensively cheapened.