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Movie drives allegory afield
By MARGO HAMMOND
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 2, 2000
Robert Redford has successfully directed several movies based on fictional works, including Norman Maclean's lyrical short story A River Runs Through It and Bernard Malamud's allegorical novel The Natural. At times, Redford changed the author's plot dramatically, but he still managed to retain the spirit of the original material. In the case of The Horse Whisperer, he even improved on it, giving Nicholas Evans' bestselling novel a totally different (and more logical) ending.
Steven Pressfield's fantasy novel The Legend of Bagger Vance, however, has not been well-served by Redford's tampering.
An imaginative and mystical novel, which uses the search for an Authentic Swing as a metaphor for finding our authentic selves, The Legend of Bagger Vance has been turned into a sentimental golf tale and sappy love story that not only isn't very original but trots out one of the silver screen's most tired cliches, the wise black servant.
Pressfield's book does center around the teachings of a mysterious black man, but his Bagger Vance is hardly the shabby itinerant of Redford's movie, wandering through the South of the 1930s, looking to caddie for a $5 fee.
In the book, Bagger Vance already is hanging out with Rannulph Junah (the scriptwriters changed it to Junuh), a troubled white golf hero whom Hardy Greaves, a young white boy, asks to represent the city of Savannah in a golf exhibition. When Junah (played convincingly by Matt Damon) introduces Bagger Vance not as his servant but as "my mentor and boon companion," the young Greaves is shocked. This is, after all, the racist South when blacks were not any kind of companions and definitely not mentors to whites.
In the movie version, the tensions between blacks and whites that characterized the era in which the story is set, however, disappear entirely. Will Smith, a black actor, is cast as Bagger Vance, but Redford's Savannah of the 1930s is a mythical wonderland where blacks and whites stand side by side on the golf course, cheering together as their city's bright white hope battles the two golf greats of the day.
Tension, however, is at the heart of Pressfield's novel, which borrows heavily from the Hindu idea of reincarnation. (Bagger Vance is perhaps a form of Bhagavan, a Sanskrit name for God.) How else does man make his choices except against the battlefield of life where racism, war, disease and other conflicts continue to play themselves out?
In the movie, the story is narrated by Greaves as an old man. In the book, the old Greaves, who has become a doctor, is telling the story to one of his students, a troubled young black man who is thinking about dropping out of medical school. Worse, Michael has also given up his golf game. Greaves is hoping, by telling him the legend of Bagger Vance that he will persuade him to get back into the game.
Redford drops this character and serves up instead a love interest for Junah, a blond socialite (fetchingly played by Charlize Theron) with whom Junah was linked before the war sapped his spirit. In scene after scene reminiscent of The Great Gatsby, another ill-fated Redford film based on a book (he played the title role), Junah and Adele Invergordon flirt their way back together at garden parties as the golf match heats up.
Meanwhile, the wise teachings of Bagger Vance, who is reduced to little more than a soulful sidekick, are boiled down to greeting card banalities. After all, why get too philosophical when you can watch beautiful blonds waltzing together after a good game of golf instead?
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