BEFORE: Moving on to golf - from an Irish boxer to an originally Scottish sport. Probably one of the only sports I know less about than boxing would be golf. I've watched a fair amount, or I should say I've recorded and fast-forwarded through a lot for work (lots of high-end financial companies sponsor tournaments, and I need to research their commercials) but watching the sport itself? No thanks, it looks way too boring.
Linking from "The Boxer", Brian Cox was also in "The Bourne Supremacy" with Matt Damon (last seen in "We Bought a Zoo").
THE PLOT: A down-and-out golfer attempts to recover his game and his life with help from a mystical caddy.
AFTER: I followed the actor linking, and once again it turned out well - both "The Boxer" and this film both feature characters who were in a war/conflict, and seek some form of refuge or redemption in sport. Tonight's central character, Rannulph Junuh, was in World War I, and was the only returning veteran from a platoon of soldiers, and clearly has some form of survivor guilt. They never really detail the circumstances, whether he was responsible for the loss of the platoon or just the (un)lucky remnant, but that's OK, we can take the horror of war as a given and move on.
When Junuh returns to the U.S., he spends a few years wandering around before returning to Savannah, Georgia, and he does not contact his girlfriend during that time. So she moves on, and becomes a golf-course entrepreneur, quite coincidentally. But our hero has lost his innocence, his relationship, and his golf swing. Still, there's really no excuse for not at least writing to your girlfriend for 10 years.
Again, quite coincidentally, this passage of time allows the film to also touch on the Great Depression, so this gives a reason for the golf course to be in financial trouble, which allows for the attempt to create an exhibition tournament - and you can see the plot points leading into one another like toppling dominoes.
Much has been written about the "magical black man" character, the caddy who arrives out of nowhere with the exact knowledge to fix the main character's golf swing, attitude, relationship and life, in that order. I'm not necessarily as opposed to the character on a racial basis as some people seem to be, but again it's a case of asking me to continually believe coincidences that get more far-fetched as the film progresses. Late in the tournament a situation comes up that just happens to teach Junuh the EXACT lesson of humility that he needs to learn to be a better golfer, and therefore a better person.
Look, I've got nothing against golf, if that's how you choose to spend your time. It's when people start saying that all of life's little lessons can be learned on the golf course that I start sensing B.S. Admittedly, most of the golf I've played has been of the miniature variety, but I never got the feeling that I was learning anything, facing my demons or getting in touch with my inner self by whacking a ball around a putting green.
Besides, they never say whether the caddy is an angel, a magician, or just a golf expert, and I really think you need to pick one at some point. If you read between the lines, supposedly "Bagger Vance" and "R. Junuh" are supposed to be verbal corruptions of "Bhagavan" (aka Krishna) and "Arjuna" from the Hindu text "The Bhagavad Gita", and the golf lessons are symbolic of Krishna's advice to a warrior who refuses to fight, to get him back on the heroic path. Again, I can't speak to this, but I did feel it was worth pointing out.
Also starring Will Smith (last seen in "Men in Black 3"), Charlize Theron (last seen in "Prometheus"), Bruce McGill (last seen in "Collateral"), Joel Gretsch (last seen in "Push"), Jack Lemmon (last seen in "The Fortune Cookie"), Lane Smith, Peter Gerety, J. Michael Moncrief, Harve Presnell.
RATING: 6 out of 10 sand traps
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