Copyright (C) 2000 by Michael Segers, All rights reserved
Guru
Redford's Mysterious Tee Ceremony
Starring—
Will
Smith
Matt
Damon
Charlize
Theron
Jack
Lemmon
J.
Michael Moncrief
Directed
by—Robert Redford
Writing
credits—Steven Pressfield (novel) and Jeremy Leven
Rated
PG-13 for some [very mild] sexual content
Runtime 127 minutes
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.
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. You should get Robert Roten’s perspective on this film from the Laramie Movie Scope. 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.