Robert Redford should be recognized just for making a good movie out of the most boring `sport' on the planet.

Rating: 10/10 (28 July 2001)

Making an entertaining film about a sport as dull as golf is challenging enough, but The Legend of Bagger Vance is not only entertaining, it is also meaningful and thought provoking. And on top of that, I saw it about two days after Jack Lemmon died, so his role in the film was that much more effective to me. With a film that metaphorically compares the pastime of golf with life there is sure to be comparisons to movies like Tin Cup, which set out with a very similar premise, but the Legend of Bagger Vance is not just a remake on the success of Tin Cup, it is worthy and meaningful in its own way.
(spoilers) The most obvious difference between the two is the fact that we see a much stronger spiritual presence here, specifically in the character of Bagger Vance, played with almost freaky charm by Will Smith. Bagger remains by Rannulph Junuh's side, providing help only when he wants to, as Junuh searches for the faults in his life and seeks to change them. In a vivid flashback, we see Junuh in battle during World War I, and he gives an order to advance which costs the life of every one of his men, and he is so grief stricken that he disappears, unable to face a hero's welcome upon returning home. He ultimately returns after an absence of over a decade, but finds that the world, including Adele Invergordon, his love, has moved on, and he winds up filling the resulting emptiness in his soul with alcohol and reducing himself to a meager existence.
Adele, meanwhile, is struggling to maintain the Invergordon golf resort, left to her by her father's suicide, which resulted from a decline in business due to the Great Depression. She proposes to have a highly publicized `exhibition match,' pitting golf greats Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen against each other, with the eventual addition of Junuh, after a widespread insistence to have a local competitor in the match and also after the reluctant dismissal of serious doubts that Junuh, the town's golf hero of the past, will ever be the great golfer that he once was. It takes some serious convincing to get Junuh to play the match after his predictable refusal, and what follows is the contradictory portion of the film, indeed, one of its only shortcomings.
We know right away that Junuh won't just agree to play the match, but when he does, he is visibly nervous at the town convention when all three golfers are introduced on stage. Junuh gets by far the loudest applause, yet he still takes off after the reception, only to change his mind and go back when he sees a few people cheering him from the side of the road as he drives by. It's a good scene, but it's strange that these few people changed his mind while the crowds of thrilled fans that responded so eagerly to his introduction only seemed to make him want to leave.
However, this is a film in which even the slightest bit of nitpicking can be catastrophic, because when viewed as a whole, the movie is stunningly creative. It starts off with an elderly Rannulph Junuh having a heart attack on a golf course (his fifth in ten years), which is followed by the entire film, told in the form of a flashback of his life up until that point. We are introduced to Bagger Vance, who is unquestionably of celestial origin, and at the closing scene, in which Bagger waves the elderly Junuh across the golf course (concluding Junuh's `search for his place in the field'), we realize that the heart attack that he had at the film's opening was fatal, and what followed was roughly two hours of his life as it flashed before his eyes while he died. That is simply a brilliant way to structure a film like this.
As is so often the case with Redford's films, The Legend of Bagger Vance is littered with stunning shots of the beauty of nature. Redford is very fond of presenting nature in a favorable way, and he does it extensively in this film. There are also several examples of Biblically originated messages and spiritual symbolisms. There is a scene where Junuh is stubbornly insisting on attempting a tremendously difficult shot, against Bagger's advice, and Bagger says, `There's a time to hit that shot, and there's a time to leave it in the bag. Which one do you feel this is?' This is a point of view taken directly from the Bible, much like that song by The Byrds, `Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season).' Ecclesiastes 3:1  3:8, I believe. There is also an allusion to Heaven and Hell when Bagger suggests to Junuh that he can just send a difficult shot off into the trees and relax. He is placing temptation at Junuh's feet, testing him, a test which he passes, but it is not until Junuh insists on accepting a penalty for accidentally moving the ball slightly - even though no one else saw it and even his opponents do not want the penalty administered  that Bagger walks off into the sunset, no longer needed.
The Legend of Bagger Vance is a film that focuses attention on the importance of leading a meaningful life by placing it entirely in the perspective of a man who is at death's door and is looking back at how he lived his own life. He clearly did not live a perfect life, he made many mistakes, but he was a good man. He was honest, he grieved for the lives that he had cost in battle, whether or not the deaths really were his fault, and he loved. He and Adele eventually did get that dance, and he died a happy and fulfilled person. Robert Redford has created another powerful and beautiful film, so enjoy it and learn from it.