Review of The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) by Phil C — 22 May 2008

Robert Redford must be on a quest to give meaning to the world's seemingly most pointless pastimes. He did it to fishing in A River Runs Through It and to equestrianism in The Horse Whisperer. However, whereas the former was quite a decent film thanks to some well written family drama aside from the obsession with fishing, the latter was a vomit inducing piece of sentimental twaddle obsessed with horses. And now comes The Legend of Bagger Vance. A film obsessed with golf which is so utterly terrible it may actually want to make you take up the game yourself. Or anything else, in fact, just to get out of the cinema.

Matt Damon is an ace amateur golfer with the unfortunate name of Rannulph Junuh. He goes off to fight in the First World War and has various traumas in the trenches of France before promptly disappearing for ten years. He returns to America just as the Great Depression hits and economically cripples his home town. Amongst those facing bankruptcy is comically named Adele Invergordon, (Charlize Theron) who has a golf course and little else to her name. She decides to rope Damon into a tournament to revive the town's fortunes. Unfortunately, poor Damon managed to "lose his swing" during the war and isn't up to the challenge. Enter Will Smith as the mysterious caddie with the worst name of all, Bagger Vance, whose insights into the interconnected worlds of golf and life help put Damon back onto the road to recovery.

There's so much wrong with this film it's difficult to know where to begin. As a period drama, for example, it manages to undermine even the best dressed sets and 1930s ambience by endowing everyone, especially Theron, with appalling Southern accents. But the biggest problem of all is the complete obsession with golf. The justification the film gives for this is that, handily, golf is a metaphor for life. The dialogue just to support this claim, though, is so atrocious you will physically wince (note such gems as: "Everyone has one authentic swing.") and isn't it funny how every sport in a movie turns out to be a metaphor for life?

The result of Redford's golf focus is that the supposedly crucial relationship between Smith and Damon never even materialising. Damon is supposedly facing personal anguish from his war days, but as properly exploring that would get in the way of the golf he's forced to look dazed in every scene for no apparent reason. And Smith simply exists to make arcane comments using golfing metaphors. As a result, he ends up sounding like a smart alec git rather than a spiritual guide. Yes, Will Smith being a smart alec. Never thought I'd see that in a film.

Put simply, there are no characters in this film. Just several different levels of obsession with golf. And surely anyone that fixated with golf would be out playing it rather than watching a film about it. Except, obviously, Robert Redford.