The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000)

Robert Redford's 2000 golf fantasy arrives with the somber confidence of a man who has decided that the game of life and the game of golf are the same game, and that we should all sit quietly while he explains the rules. Matt Damon plays Rannulph Junuh, a Savannah golden boy hollowed out by the Great War, who returns to Georgia as a poker-playing drunk with a broken swing. Will Smith glides in as Bagger Vance, a caddy of unexplained origin and unlimited wisdom, and the film asks us to accept this figure without a flicker of curiosity about where he came from or why he speaks in parables.

The trouble is the setting. The story unfolds in 1931 Georgia, and the movie treats the era as a gentle pageant of straw hats and fairways. Segregation does not intrude. Nobody mentions it. Spike Lee later observed that Black men were being lynched across the South while Bagger Vance concerned himself with improving a white man's golf swing, and the criticism has aged better than the film. Smith is magnetic and the role is a monument to the Magical Negro template: the mystical Black servant whose only function is to heal the white hero's soul and then vanish.

Charlize Theron's Adele fights to save her family's resort, which is more agency than the screenplay ultimately allows her. She becomes the prize at the end of the tournament. Redford photographs it all sumptuously, and the Bhagavad Gita scaffolding gives the aphorisms a faint spiritual sheen. But the Depression is scenery, the wisdom is soft, and the whole enterprise drifts past on good intentions and immaculate light. A box office failure, and an instructive one.