The Legend of Bagger Vance

"The Legend of Bagger Vance" is a beautiful film. It stars beautiful people (Will Smith, Matt Damon and Charlize Theron) and is directed by another beautiful person (Robert Redford). They live in the beautiful town of Savannah, Georgia, where even the lesser-paid actors all speak in beautiful Southern lilts and say beautiful things like "our gentle-born chevalier" in casual conversation. In this beautiful town, Theron's dad has built an exceptionally beautiful golf course, with beautiful vistas and fairways and woods and greens and bunkers, which attracts other beautiful people to play it. Eventually, Damon comes to terms with the beautiful environment surrounding him and the beauty inside him and the beautiful world he lives in, at which point the film ends. Yes, this is a beautiful film all around. But it is so completely emotionally and intellectually empty that, unless you are an all-out golf fetishist, it's almost impossible to wholeheartedly enjoy it.

It's not just that the plot is predictable, although the plot certainly is predictable. Damon has the beautiful (in a Southern accent, anyway) name of Runnulph Junuh, and the not-so-beautiful burden of having been the only man in his company to survive a charge during World War I. Before the war he had been both a championship golfer and part of a beautiful couple with Adele Invergordon (Theron). Now he is reduced to getting drunk and uttering pseudo-profundities off in the woods, having lost both his swing and his desire to court Invergordon. But Invergordon has plenty of other things to do, as she organizes a golf tournament at a course she has inherited, both to establish it as a destination resort and to honor her late father, who constructed it. Will Junuh, the "Pride of Savannah," represent the town in a match with Bobby Jones and Walter Hagan (real oustanding golfers, both)? Will Junuh's swing and his romance return with the mystical advice of his mysterious new caddy Bagger Vance (Smith)? Will little narrator Hardy Greaves (J. Michael Moncrief) learn Important Lessons about life from Vance and Junuh? Two guesses.

This is not a film to attend for its exciting plot. The acting is much better, with Damon and Smith both at their charmingest. Damon, a better rogue than paragon, takes well to slinging the drunken banter and making social isolation and nihilism look and sound so good. Smith delivers his very, very gentle humor perfectly, and never overplays the hand he has been dealt by the script. Will Smith is one of the few actors working today who could make the mystical insights about the nature of golf and life he has to spout vaguely watchable. Theron as the brusque Invergordon manages to look good and act well in the same film, a combination of talents too often missing from young starlets. And little Moncrief is one of the least annoying child narrators of recent years.

The actors do a good job with what little they have. But ultimately, there is nothing there. The life lessons Vance imparts to Junuh (and, occasionally, Moncrief) are indescribably vapid, and there are so few of them that Redford resorts to having them "echo" in Damon's head as he begins his swing. One keeps waiting for inspiring rhetoric from Vance, as a payoff for sitting through the beauty of the exposition, but it never comes. All we get are gestures - Faure's Requiem playing as a golf ball soars, gentle and inarticulate debates between Vance and Junuh about whether or not he can "do this." There is no philosophy beyond that which can be communicated by beautiful images.

More seriously, through this film's two-hour unspooling, none of the characters ever seem as though they are struggling. They simply learn the lessons they have to learn at the times they are supposed to learn them. There is never any tension at all about how the film is going to end, so it falls on Redford to make getting there harrowing enough to place a happy finish in momentary doubt. He doesn't do it, and doesn't seem particularly interesting in trying. He likes the golf course better.

So "The Legend of Bagger Vance" ends up being nothing more than a visual feast, beautiful scene after beautiful scene, little magic moments of light and space and time in which nothing of much consequence happens. In this, "The Legend of Bagger Vance" so much resembles golf that golf enthusiasts may well find this to be a terrific film. The rest of us will find that, in a completely lackluster autumn for dramatic cinema, "The Legend of Bagger Vance" is nothing better than par for the course.

BIGGUS DICKENS

The first paragraph here is my tribute to a very famous passage in Big Chuck Dickens' "Our Mutual Friend" where he virtually makes an epithet out of the word "new" in describing the Veneerings. Why I thought this movie review was a good place to do this is a mystery to me, but I tend to think it works.

Dramas Home

Movie Reviews Home

Spam-O-Matic Home