THE LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE

Peter Keough

You know this is a legend because it's set in the Deep South at a time when thousands of lynchings took place and there's nary a mention of racism. Instead, we have Will Smith at his sardonic best playing a mystical lawn jockey -- think of The Green Mile without the mile -- named Bagger Vance. (It's a play on Bhagavad Gita, the epic Hindu religious poem, which is the source of the Steven Pressfield novel on which the movie is based, though director Robert Redford doesn't push the literary heavy lifting.) He arrives in Savannah at the height of the Depression not to ease the plight of the starving unemployed but to help local golden boy Rannulph Junuh ("Arjuna" from the poem, if you're still taking notes), who's played with a post-Rain Man accent by Matt Damon, win a golf match against greats Bobby Jones (Joel Gretsch) and Walter Hagen (Bruce McGill) by serving as Rannulph's caddy.

Dismayed by the horrors of World War I (which look, in flashback, like a walk in the park next to Saving Private Ryan), Rannulph has "lost his swing." He loses still more when he falls flat in the clinch with the lovely Adele (Charlize Theron, showing glimpses of classic beauty, irrelevantly), his old flame and the local heiress, whose estate depends on the success of the links exhibition. Narrated tiresomely by Jack Lemmon in the longest death scene in movie history, this overripe return to an era of entitlement and mock aristocracy has as its moral "Your swing is out there waiting for you," or "Different strokes for different folks." Me, I prefer the legend of Tiger Woods.