Before The Legend of Bagger Vance even began, I was willing, albeit reluctant, to accept golf as a metaphor for life. I've known enough serious golfers to understand that golf is always a metaphor for something. After all, if golf were ever allowed to be just its plain old self, there could be no argument about how dull a game it is.
In any case, the golf metaphors in The Legend of Bagger Vance are far less irritating than the caddy metaphors. Tell me that golf is like life and I will feign polite attention. But when you suggest that caddies are like guardian angels, you shouldn't be surprised if my response is to punch you in the mouth.
Bagger Vance (Will Smith) is a caddy who apparently materializes out of the deep personal need that Rannolph Junuh (Matt Damon) has to find his way back to light, truth, justice, and life (i.e. golf). An insipid and perfunctory introductory sequence narrated by Jack Lemmon tells us that Junuh was the most promising golfer of the American South when WWI broke out and he joined the army. He was distinguished in combat, but learned terrible things about the brutality of which man is capable. The war broke his spirit because that's what war does to nice, clean-cut boys like Matt Damon.
His engagement to Adele Invergordon (Charlize Theron), the belle of Savannah, doesn't seem very interesting to him after the war because once you've seen men die right before your eyes, you find that the vapid female characters of the average Robert Redford film aren't really any more capable of holding your attention than that of the audience.
In order to avoid bankruptcy and realize her father's dream (because she is far too underdeveloped to have a real dream of her own), Adele must convince Bobby Jones (Joel Gretsch), Walter Hagen (Bruce McGill), and Rannolph Junuh to play for a $10,000 purse on the posh golf course that her father built just as the world was teetering into a depression.
Bobby Jones is a nice man. Walter Hagen is a playboy. And Rannolph Junuh must find the golf swing that he has lost. Bagger Vance helps him to recover his swing by endlessly repeating the titles of all the books on golfing that my brother-in-law is forever urging me to read. In clearing away a twig that is blocking his ball, Junuh inadvertantly moves the ball, which obliges him to call a stroke on himself. Being a man of honor, he penalizes himself by one swing, which turns out to be the swing he had lost. Awww.
He has internalized Bagger Vance's idiotic lesson, which is that we all come into this world with one perfect swing, one thing that we do just right. We can't learn that swing; we have to remember it. It comes to us and works through us as our birthright if only we let it. Apparently everyone has a perfect swing, as Jones routinely and Hagen occasionally even stumble onto their perfect swings. It's a very pretty and very egalitarian-sounding philosophy until you start pitting one person's perfect swing against someone else's. Then it turns out that certain cosmically perfect swings are somehow more perfect than other cosmically perfect swings. There's a brilliant moment in a South Park episode in which Stan asks his football coach what point there is in praying to God for victory if the other team is praying to the same God for the same exact thing. Once we set about the task of competing with others, these beautifully egalitarian philosophies don't make any sense. Junuh and Jones can talk all they want about playing the course rather than each other, but the scoreboard that is carried behind them announces how far ahead the leader is, not how many times he has swung.
And of course, after taking tremendous pains to teach us that how we play the game matters far more than whether or not we win, it might have been interesting to see Junuh lose. But he finishes with a brilliant putt that wins him the respect of his competitors and the heart of the woman sponsoring the tournament. He and Adele talk an awful lot about dancing with one another, but do precious little dancing even though they are forever encountering one another on the dancefloor of her resort. It's enough to make you think that they're talking about another kind of dancing altogether--if you know what I mean, wink wink, nudge nudge.
Once we learn that we'll start winning as soon as we stop trying to win, that we should go ahead and fall in love with two-dimensional women because they're the easiest kind to write dialogue for, and that black men in the South were called 'Sir' by young white boys in the '20s and '30s--once we have learned these important lessons, we are excused from what I have to categorize as a three-star film because it is nothing if not average, ordinary, run-of-the-mill, commonplace, pedestrian, and any synonyms that you can find in your own thesaurus under 'mediocre.'
From Academy Award -winning director Robert Redford comes a wondrous film that celebrates the immense power and infinite potential of the human spirit...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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