The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000)
Directed by Robert Redford
World War I has left golfer Rannulph Junuh a poker-playing alcoholic, his perfect swing gone. Now, however, he needs to get it back to play in a tournament to save the financially ravaged golf course of a long-ago sweetheart. Help arrives in the form of mysterious caddy Bagger Vance.
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What critics compared The Legend of Bagger Vance to
There's a certain beauty and poetry to films like "A River Runs Through It," "The Horse Whisperer" and his new golf-as-philosophy fable "The Legend of Bagger Vance," but it's a Hallmark card kind of beauty and poetry, printed on flimsy paperboard and worth $2.50 at most.
Whether it's skiing (Downhill Racer), baseball (The Natural), or fly-fishing (A River Runs Through It), the idea is the same.
The film's elevation of golf to a metaphor for living is a direct successor to Redford's use of trout fishing in "A River Runs Through It" and horse training in "The Horse Whisperer," not to mention his starring role as a baseball player in "The Natural."
Like "A River Runs Through It," "The Legend of Bagger Vance" features a protagonist who has to look deep inside himself to excel at a thoroughly un-cinematic sport.
Director Robert Redford clearly has a predilection for casting actors that bear a remarkable resemblance to himself as a younger man - witness Brad Pitt in A River Runs Through It and now Matt Damon in The Legend of Bagger Vance.
If you enjoyed A River Runs Through It and The Horse Whisperer, you’ll probably like The Legend of Bagger Vance.
As much as it is noteworthy for anything else in particular, what has remained shocking above all else regarding the Harry Potter franchise is how inordinately consistent Überproducer David Heyman has managed to keep the quality level (absent the shitty first two, Sorcerer's Stone and Chamber of Secrets , both of them perpetrated by the miserable hack Chris Columbus) across four directors, six cinematographers, five editors, four composers, and one intensely over-worked production designer in the form of Stuart Craig, whose last non-Potter movie was The Legend of Bagger Vance all the way back in 2000, and who must be uniquely pleased out of all the hundreds of men and women who've sunk time into the series that at long goddamn last he can move on to doing anything else in the whole wide world.
To some extent, Ben is a well-written senior-citizen variation on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (as in "Elizabethtown") or the Magic Negro (as in "The Legend of Bagger Vance"), to cite two infamous stock characters who exist to help a movie hero change his life and realize his potential.
Smith, masterfully portraying the group’s most talented member and erstwhile leader, is particularly stuck between a rock and a hard place, and while his character Ray is the most magnetic and intelligently nuanced of the quartet he is also a stock piece of cliché who comes perilously close to being the offensive “magical negro” stereotype straight out of What Dreams May Come , The Green Mile or The Legend of Bagger Vance .
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The Blind Side seemed to take it one step further by introducing another dubious cinematic trope, “The Magic Negro,” an intentionally anachronistic term denoting a character of color who saves the story and the white protagonist specifically by means of some special insight or power (think The Green Mile or The Legend of Bagger Vance ).
Perhaps Redford, tired of qualified reviews for his beautiful but overindulgent productions like The Horse Whisperer and The Legend Of Bagger Vance , has decided to get back to his roots.
This angel is played by Anthony Mackie — doing a fairly close approximation of Will Smith’s angel in Damon’s earlier brush with the supernatural, “The Legend of Bagger Vance.”
The bureau is staffed with characters played by good actors like John Slattery (dull-witted company man), Anthony Mackie (sympathetic ally), and Terence Stamp (scary mind-blanker), but none of them gets a chance to cut loose—and Mackie unfortunately evokes Will Smith as Damon’s magical New Age black caddie in the soul-curdling The Legend of Bagger Vance.