A Legend to forget

he Legend of Bagger Vance is a soft-focus fantasia of once-upon-a-times, many-moons-agos and nine-irons, touted by its studio as "a lyrical, mystical period fantasy about golf." Aw, man-not another one!

All sepia tones and sprawling vistas, this gauzy, utterly airheaded confection comes courtesy of Robert Redford, who once knew how to craft sensitive and assured flights of fancy (A River Runs Through It, The Horse Whisperer) without tilting into Zen excess. In Depression-era Savannah, the improbably named Adele Invergordon (Charlize Theron, trying hard) risks her mildewed family fortune on a golf tournament, which attracts the attention of real-life fairway luminaries Walter Hagen (Bruce McGill) and Bobby Jones (Joel Gretsch). Adele also enlists the participation of Rannulph Junuh (Matt Damon), once Georgia's greatest golfer, now a man so lazy that he loiters in bars and calls himself Rannulph. It's not clear why Adele recruits Junuh for the event; perhaps she realized she hadn't filled the tournament's embattled alcoholic underdog quota. Or maybe she's still enamored of Rannulph, her lover of yore before he lost his soul (and his swing) in the Great War. "I liked the way we danced," Adele muses all these years later, though she would have been pre-pubescent at the time she recalls so wistfully.

But Rannulph can't recover his game. Enter Will Smith as Bagger Vance, an enigmatic black man who shuffles his loafers and addresses Junuh as "suh" with studied deference. It soon becomes clear that the caddy alone knows the Mystery of the Authentic Swing, which in this movie is even better than the Secret of the G-Spot. Thus armed, Rannulph begins to rebound, to rediscover his zest for life, to... well, you know the drill.

Something-many things-must be said about Bagger, who dispenses little homilies like "Everyone's got one true swing" with metronomic precision. The caddy is a sanctimonious twerp, a manifestation of the synthetic spirituality championed by Chicken Soup for the Soul and Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile. That Will Smith, with his shambling cool and earthy wit, is capable of embodying such an unappealing character is a revelation; that he can embody this character in a movie co-starring Matt Damon and still emerge the worse is a harbinger of apocalypse.

Damon, for his part, has become an unbearably smug leading man. Nothing about his performance-from his unwieldy Georgia drawl to his unwieldy putt-convinces, and it's hard to buy this fresh-scrubbed frat boy as a scarred war veteran. Damon doesn't quite capsize the film, as he did with his miserably graceless turn in The Talented Mr. Ripley-before he has the chance, Bagger Vance thoughtfully capsizes itself, sinking in a morass of undernourished narrative development. Will Junuh regain his lost glory? Will his romance with Adele resuscitate itself? Will somebody take a chipping wedge to Bagger's skull? Please?

According to the press materials, Jeremy Leven adapted this screenplay from Steven Pressfield's 1995 novel, though I suspect Leven in fact cribbed a good 70 percent of the dialogue from bumper stickers. As Bagger intones such automobile-ready platitudes as "A man's grip on his club is like a man's grip on his world" and "Golf's a game that can't be won, only played," we wait for him to add such fluff as "My Kid Is An Honor Student" or "I love Jesus" as well.

As directed by an apparently medicated Redford, Bagger Vance lists weightlessly from one sermon to another. It's grossly irresponsible history-glossing over the Depression and World War I and trivializing the plight of American blacks (who presumably had more pressing concerns than Matt Damon's bogies)-but the film is too benignly wispy to offend. Too benignly wispy to stomach, in fact.