(rated PG 13, 127 mins.)
Hardy Greaves (Jack Lemmon), a die hard golf fan, lays on a golf course after a (fifth) heart attack, to reminisce and narrate about post WW1, when his hero Rannulph Junah (Matt Damon) was Savannah’s premiere golfer. Young Hardy (portrayed by J. Michael Moncrief) steals the movie from the get-go (as though he’s barely acting) in his passionate story about Adele (Charlize Theron), who inherits a dream country club, accompanied by a mountain full of debt when daddy dies. “I’m gonna have the greatest exhibition match on the greatest golf course ever made” are her words. She schmoozes a team up between the premiere New York golfers Walter Hagen (Bruce McGill) and Bobby Jones (Joel Gretsch) against Junah (Damon) her estranged lover for good reason. They do a lot of staring at each other but never make a move for almost ten years! In the beginning we feel forced to care about these people by the over-dramatic scenes laced with heavy soundtrack before we are even given a chance to feel involved with their lives. But, on a typical Junah drunken night, Bagger Vance, (Will Smith) appears in Junah’s darkened yard to deliver his most sophisticated performance to date. Like Damon’s role in “Good Will Hunting” he is taught the mathematics of the lessons of life through Vance’s golf analogies. Directed with style by Robert Redford, the story is slow (think Redford’s “A River Runs Through It”), yet just plain nice, managing to inject Biblical archetypes and comes out as a hole in one.
