Redford is fascinated with both the limits and the bold potency of masculinity, but he's afflicted by a curious unwillingness to get his hands dirty. In terms of visual textures at least, pictures like "The Horse Whisperer," "A River Runs Through It" and now "Bagger Vance" achieve a certain suede-jacket roughness but not much more -- they reek of Iron John gone wild with a Banana Republic charge card.

In Redford's world, men brood, stew and stare off into space until someone -- it could be a strong, good-hearted woman, or a cheerful black man, or a combination of the two -- comes along to make him realize that his problem is that he thinks he's the prince of his own little world. How silly he'd been! Why settle for prince when he could be king? Once his worldview is suitably adjusted, he can go about the business of being a man, slow dancing and slow kissing when romance is called for, and swinging a golf club when it's time to hit the ball. He's learned an essential lesson: Life is complicated -- but not all that complicated.

In "Bagger Vance," set in Depression-era Savannah, Ga., our deflated junior monarch is Matt Damon as a once-golden boy called Rannulph Junuh (that's Hunuj Hplunnar spelled backward). In the old days, everything always went right for Junuh: He'd earned the love of steel magnolia sweetie Adele Invergordon (Charlize Theron); he was a golf whiz who won tournament after tournament; he seemed poised to take over the world. Then he went off to war and saw things no man should ever have to see. After his discharge, he eschewed the hero's honors that could have been bestowed upon him and sank into a mire of card playing and heavy drinking, abandoning his lady love in the process.

Unwilling to lie around with a broken heart, spunky Adele attempts to save her dead father's dream golf resort from foreclosure by staging a big tournament starring two of the hottest golfers of the day (Bruce McGill and Joel Gretsch). Who will be the third player? An enterprising lad named Hardy (J. Michael Moncrief; his grown-up self, played in a syrupy cameo by Jack Lemmon, is the picture's narrator) seeks out his hero, Junuh, and drags him back onto the golf course to shape up for the big match.

The problem, as we're repeatedly reminded in case we have trouble processing the movie's central metaphor, is that Junuh has lost his swing, his zest for life. One day, as Junuh haplessly shanks ball after ball into nowheresville, a mysterious figure emerges from the landscape -- he's kind of see-through, so he may even be a ghost. It's Bagger Vance (Will Smith), with a happy smile, a how-de-do and methodically cheerful advice. "You've lost your swing," he says. "You have to go find it." In order to help Rannulph along his hero's course, he's honored to carry Junuh's golf bags.

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