The Legend of Bagger Vance Review
by Scott Renshaw (renshaw AT inconnect DOT com)November 5th, 2000
THE LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE
(DreamWorks)
Starring: Will Smith, Matt Damon, Charlize Theron, J. Michael Moncrief, Bruce McGill, Joel Gretsch.
Screenplay: Jeremy Leven, based on the novel by Steven Pressfield. Producers: Jake Eberts, Michael Nozik and Robert Redford. Director: Robert Redford.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (adult themes, wartime violence)
Running Time: 125 minutes.
Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Philosophy generally makes for godawful cinema. Steven Pressfield's novel THE LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE seemed like a terribly unlikely candidate for a film translation, because it wasn't really a novel. It was a primer in Hindu spiritual thought (Bagger Vance, Baghavad ... get it?) combined with a mash note to the game of golf, wrapped loosely around a period narrative. There was no way Pressfield's book could be turned into an engaging film. Then again, that's what people said about Norman Maclean's A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT, and somehow director Robert Redford managed to turn that book into a pretty solid film. But how would a text comprised primarily of mystical lessons and play-by-play from the links be rendered on screen?
Redford's adaptation of THE LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE radically re-imagines Pressfield's novel to make it a more palatable screen story. In so doing, he rips out its soul and leaves a fairly bland sports drama in its place. The bulk of the film takes place in Savannah, Georgia in 1931, where a once-in-a-lifetime event is about to take place. Cash-strapped heiress Adele Invergordon (Charlize Theron), desperate to generate interest in her late father's golf resort while the Depression rages, arranges for an exhibition match between the era's two golf giants: Bobby Jones (Joel Gretsch) and Walter Hagen (Bruce McGill). There's also interest in adding a local boy to the field, and everyone knows that World War I hero and former amateur champion Rannulph Junuh (Matt Damon) should be the one. But Junuh, psychologically scarred by the war, has no interest in playing until a mysterious fellow named Bagger Vance (Will Smith) shows up and offers to be Junuh's caddy.
It's easy to see the logic behind most of screenwriter Jeremy Leven's decisions in adapting BAGGER VANCE. He creates a romantic sub-plot by casting Adele and Junuh as former lovers separated by circumstance; he excises most of Baggers' lengthy speeches; he even tries to build up the character of the young boy (J. Michael Moncrief) who will become the story's flashback narrator (an uncredited Jack Lemmon) by exploring his family's losses due to the Depression. The story is streamlined into a tale of redemption and lost love regained, and the climax is rendered as a nigh-mythical clash of titans. It's all quite clean and efficient, with all the prosaic descriptions of transcendentally significant dogleg lefts and most of the revelatory visions left on the page.
In fact, it's so clean and efficient that it hardly registers as a drama at all. While Pressfield's novel wasn't terribly concerned with making his characters genuinely complex, it didn't really matter contextually. Leven and Redford don't add much to that complexity, and here it matters a lot. Redford is too concerned with making the atmosphere mystical to give Junuh's pain an earthly urgency, and Matt Damon's performance suffers as a result. Charlize Theron gets to weep a bit, but Adele has "romantic interest" written all over her from the outset. Will Smith does fine, relaxed work as Bagger, but his importance as a spiritual teacher is diminished with his teachings reduced to fortune cookie-sized aphorisms. BAGGER VANCE was not going to work on the screen with twenty minute sermons on the Authentic Swing; it makes perfect sense to shift the focus to the characters. It makes no sense to shift the focus, then still leave the characters underdeveloped.
As usual, Redford directs a technically accomplished piece of work, beautifully photographed by Michael Ballhaus and smoothly edited. There's simply no weight to any of it, despite the intrusively heavy score by Rachel Portman. Instead of a meditation on a personal journey to enlightenment told through the unique nature of the game of golf, the film becomes a period piece with a few appealing performances. What remains is a film about whether or not Junuh will win the big golf match and/or win the girl. And while it's competently rendered, it's not exactly the matter of cosmic import the film builds it up to be. You can't blame a filmmaker for radically altering a text as inherently uncinematic as THE LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE. Redford, however, alters it to the point that you wonder why he bothered to make it at all. He understood that philosophy generally makes for godawful cinema. He didn't understand that without the philosophy, or rich characterizations to replace it, THE LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE just barely breaks par.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 missing links: 5.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- Visit Scott Renshaw's Screening Room
http://www.inconnect.com/~renshaw/
***
Subscribe to receive new reviews directly by email!
See the Screening Room for details, or reply to this message with subject "Subscribe".
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
More on 'The Legend of Bagger Vance'...
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
