Bagger Vance Reviewed

ROVIN' AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE

Guru Redford's Mysterious Tee Ceremony

This is a beautiful film, set in a beautiful city (Savannah), with a beautiful woman (Charlize Theron), some handsome men (Matt Damon and Will Smith), great clothes, lush music, and a whole lot of examples of what not to do in a movie.

Let’s face something not so beautiful about this film up front, and that is, its portrayal of race relations in Savannah shortly after World War I. Smith, as the title character (but a supporting role), does well on his side of the equation, with the big smile and the yassah, it’s the white side that does not capture the soullessness of racism. Of course, no one uses the word that can’t be heard outside of a Spike Lee film, but beyond that, no one even notices that Vance is black.

That is typical of the whole film. With the great Jack Lemmon narrating (as a golfer suffering a heart attack on a golf course, remembering, many decades later, the story of the film), the film tells, it does not show. The absurdly named Junuh (Damon) is suffering from what today we would call post-traumatic stress and has sunk into drink and despair after World War I, which is reduced to about thirty flickering seconds. While Damon was great in The Talented Mr. Ripley—playing a poor nobody trying to pass as an aristocratic somebody—he is not up or down to the current assignment, playing an aristocratic somebody reduced to a drunk nobody. We are told that Junuh and Adele Invergordon (Theron) once had an attraction for each other, but although their relationship has been on hold for a decade, she shows neither bitterness about the loss nor joy about the reunion. She says that the one thing that she liked about their relationship was the way they danced together. The little bit of sexual content involves Adele rather mechanically stripping to her underwear to swap sex for golf.

And that’s the problem. Golf is just not a strong enough image or idea to carry this movie—maybe it was enough for Caddy Shack. The basic story is that Junuh, once Savannah’s golden boy of golf, has “lost his swing” after serving in the war. A mysterious caddy, Vance, shows up in the darkness, to teach him an inner game, a Zen-ner game, of golf, with weird platitudes that don’t really teach much about anything, before fading back into the darkness. I am left with a great big, So what?

As actor, director, or producer, Redford seems drawn to strange stories that put more metaphorical weight on a sport than it really can support: The Natural, A River Runs Through It, even The Horse Whisperer. Ernest Hemingway pulled off such a feat with The Old Man and the Sea, but he was writing about fishing in a life-and-death situation, not the fly-fishing of a dilettante. For that matter, Graham Greene did it with adultery, of all things, in The End of the Affair, the story of a woman who reaches sainthood by passing through adultery.

Supposedly, Pressfield’s novel is a retelling of the Hindu “holy song,” the Bhagavad Gita, with Bagger Vance’s name suggesting bhagavad (holy) and Rannulph Junuh (R. Junuh) being Arjuna, the warrior in the Gita, who lost his resolve. Oh, come on, that is the kind of stuff that I used to have nightmares and term papers about when I was taking graduate courses in literature. But, it doesn’t give you much to go on in a movie.

Nothing happens, except for a game of golf that lasts about half the length of the film. Golf seems to be some sort of mystic force that draws together rich and poor, black and white, even the rebellious teenaged boy Harvey (Moncrief, the younger version of narrator Lemmon’s character) and his father.

Nobody has anything to do, except for Lemmon, who has to fill in far more than eighteen holes in the story with long-winded narration. Although we are told about all these connections, we don’t see them or feel them. An Academy Award nomination for Will Smith? That’s the buzz on the Internet, but to create an award-worthy performance, you have to have something to work with, and Smith is given no personality, no emotion, just a string of mismatched platitudes. Oh, he does his best, but nobody could do much with this material.

As for me, I may put R&R on hold for a few months and write a screenplay for Redford’s next opus, a spare but striking tale of finding the meaning of life in a bowling alley. And we all should keep our feet dry, our hearts full of noble thoughts, and—yes, I can still say something good about something—our televisions tuned to Fox on Monday nights for Boston Public. [2004 update: Not anymore!]