OxfordPress.com

Grade: B

Verdict: Swings for the stars. Sometimes makes it, sometimes doesn't.

Details: Starring Will Smith, Matt Damon and Charlize Theron. Directed by Robert Redford. Rated PG-13 for sexuality and brief violence. Two hours, 5 minutes

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Review: "The Legend of Bagger Vance," Robert Redford does for golf what he did for fly-fishing in "A River Runs Through It." He turns a solitary, often romanticized sport into a shimmering life metaphor.

So be aware: not everyone is going to embrace this film's mythic aspirations. But if you know someone with a dog-eared copy of "Harvey Pennick's Little Red Book" stashed away in a convenient place, encourage them to stow the irons and head for the movie theater. As for anyone else, well, you may not understand (and may the golf gods forgive you), but you may well respond to the large-hearted pleasures of a movie intoxicated by its own romanticism.

The time is that magic succession of moments suspended between the first hole and the eighteenth. The place is any golf course ever played by any golfer.

More prosaically, the time is the Depression South; the place Savannah, Ga. Rannulph Junah (Matt Damon) - the name itself evokes a dreamy Southern drawl - is a natural with a drive so mighty that he makes John Daly look like a duffer and a short game as sweet as Tiger Woods' smile. Rannulph woulda' been a contender except that he marched off to World War I where he saw his entire company slaughtered. War, you see, is not a gentleman's game. Returning home, he holes up out of town with some poker buddies and several thousand bottles of booze. He doesn't even bother sending his regrets to his former fiancée, Adele Invergordon (Charlize Theron).

However, Adele's got more to worry about than a broken heart. The grand golf course envisioned by her late father has run into a sandtrap called the Depression. In order to save the place from creditors, she proposes a match game between two golfing legends: Bobby Jones, the untouchable gentleman's gentleman (played with a sunny, golden-boy elan by Joel Gretsch) and Walter Hagen, a womanizing braggart with a canny eye for courses and people (played with scene-stealing swagger by Bruce McGill).

The citizens of Savannah demand a local champion, and a young golf-crazy boy (J. Michael Moncrief, providing the film's fable-like filter) suggests Rannulph. Problem is, the 19th hole is the only one Rannulph's been frequenting for the last 10 years or so. But as every golfer knows, for every problem, there's a solution.

Rannulph's appears in the form of Bagger Vance (Will Smith) who walks out of the deep velvet shadows of a soft Southern night and offers to be his caddy in return for five bucks.

Along with "A River Runs Through It," "Bagger Vance" may suggest "The Natural" or "Field of Dreams." Actually, it's closer to the fairy-tale world of "The Black Stallion." There's the same unspecified nostalgia for some unspecified American past, the same insistence on something more at stake than the Big Game or the Big Race, the same strange, overstated remove that sometimes invests the film with a fantastic, trancelike ecstasy.

At the same time, Redford dots the picture with traces of his own cinematic past. There's the prankish humor of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" in the lengthy pre-match prologue; the swooning if-only romanticism of "The Great Gatsby" in the Adele/Rannulph side-plot. Redford's cinematographer, the formidable Michael Ballhaus, bathes the movie in a luminous glow, turning fairways into lush stairways to heaven, greens into emerald-ripe islands of perfection.

Where the film falters is in the script with its overwritten aphorisms and underwritten characters. Bagger's endless supply of Haiku-R-Us nuggets of wisdom won't bother true lovers of the game, but others may wince at the oft-repeated analogies between golf and, um, life. Further, the movie has a lumpy structure. Not enough time is given to establishing the bond between the two leads. One minute Bagger strolls into Rannulph's life; the next, they're teeing off against Hagen and Jones.

As for the cast, Theron seems luscious but miscast. She's a bright, gorgeous performer, but she doesn't project much, well, humanity. So it's a little hard to dig down and root for her.

By contrast, Smith somehow transcends a role as trickily fraught as a water hazard. He seems to be channeling Morgan Freeman (for whom the role was first envisioned), but you have to add Smith's distinctive charm as well as the breezy self-confidence and inviting warmth he brought to "Six Degrees of Separation." He doesn't just deliver a line; he sinks it with the that's that finish of a hole in one.

As for Damon, he carries on the tradition of the Redford-surrogate - think Brad Pitt in "A River Runs Through It" - with distinction. He has that movie-star thing that can't be imitated or directed. Even his forced smiles are dazzling. "The Legend of Bagger Vance" is a big, plush slow-moving movie, the cinematic equivalent, perhaps, of a Lincoln Continental or a Cadillac. It's a picture that takes its time and says its piece.

As someone remarks about Hagen, "He had learned long ago that three bad shots and one brilliant shot can still make par." You might say that about Redford as well.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service