The Legend Of Bagger Vance

By EWAM McDONALD

(Herald rating: * * * * )

Robert Redford had the worst job on this movie: director. The golf nut reckoned everybody else got to play the mostly beautiful game while he got to watch and work.

There are unkind critics who have suggested he might have been better off playing golf instead of making this movie but I quite enjoyed it, and I give out the stars on this column.

Savannah, Georgia, in the first years of the Depression, a man builds a great golf course, goes broke and shoots himself. His daughter Adele (Charlize Theron) risks everything on a $10,000 tournament.

She invites the two great golfers of the day, Bobby Jones (Joel Gretsch) and Walter Hagen (Bruce McGill).

She also inveigles Rannulph Junuh (Matt Damon), the greatest player in town until he went to the Great War, and spent the 1920s drinking and playing poker.

Junuh doesn't want to make a comeback but three people want him to: Adele, his pre-war lover; a golf-mad kid, Hardy (J. Michael Moncrief); and Bagger Vance (Will Smith), a caddy who appears from nowhere.

Jones and Hagen, the real-life champions, are good sportsmen but, as required by scriptwriters, opposites. Jones is handsome and plays, well, a beautiful game; Hagen has a beer gut, chain-smokes and is always getting into trouble then saving himself.

Will Smith plays Bagger Vance in an understated way, which isn't a word usually associated with Will Smith. Is he a real person or a spirit? You figure. The kid, of course, is there because he has to become an old man (the late Jack Lemmon) and tell this gentle story.

Running time: 127 mins

Rental: Now