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attention on another directorial project irritated Redford. “Bob was really authoring himself,” says Eberts, “but that’s his style. He is the ghostwriter, don’t doubt it.” Script finally in hand, Rachel Portman, an English composer, was engaged to produce the lushly nostalgic sound track. Michael Ballhaus, the cinematographer of Quiz Show, was, untypically, hired again. South African Charlize Theron, whom Redford had liked in The Astronaut’s Wife, was cast as Adele. For Theron, Bagger Vance had a special resonance. Her own life story was about recovering the groove. Her father had run a very successful business as a road builder. When he died, the banks descended, recalling loans. Only her mother’s tenacity, says Theron, regained the family’s solvency. “I related to Bagger Vance,” said Theron. “[I had] an emotional connection with the characters and with their predicament.” Jack Lemmon, professing himself retired, was lured back as the elderly narrator recalling Junuh’s grand moment. Says Redford, “As a director, you are looking for actors that are tonal, like paints on a palette. You need them to complement and set off each other. I didn’t get all the right people on Bagger, but I got enough to make a go of it.”

There was optimism in the air in the summer of 1999 as Bagger Vance shooting got under way in Savannah, Georgia. “He’d proven a lot commercially with The Horse Whisperer,” says Jake Eberts, “and we were feeling he was going from strength to strength.”

When the movie wrapped at Christmas, Redford was satisfied. He stayed alone in Utah as the year 2000 dawned, in the Big House, reading Carlos Baker’s Emerson Among the Eccentrics. Throughout his life, he learned, Emerson carried a compass. The miracle of its magnetic needle, wrote Baker, bore witness to the divine spirit of nature. “I like,” said Emerson, “to hold the visible god in my hand.” Redford found the notion of palpable metaphor intriguing. It recalled for him his instinctive aspiration in all his ambitious work. “I tried not to overanalyze any movie of mine or anyone else’s, and generally self-important cinema annoys me. But there’s no question that there’s such a thing as ‘serious cinema.’ Seriousness, as Leonard Cohen says, is deeply agreeable to the human spirit. So there’s a validity to movies of ambition, movies that say something. Concept and realization may not marry, of course. Movies fail. But the trying is legitimate. I didn’t always stretch with my work, but when I did, it was in hope of generating other ideas—in the audience, as in myself. Observation, commentary, polemic—all seem to me fairly within the remit of modern cinema. And it’s healthy to stretch.” Such was the reasoning behind Bagger Vance.

Bagger Vance was announced for a June 2000 release, but when Walter Parkes, the studio executive, saw the proposed final cut, it was pulled at the last minute. Reportedly, Parkes was less than delighted with its two hours–plus of sunset golf courses, mellow whimsy and rambling voice-overs. “Parkes couldn’t make sense of it,” says a Sundance staffer. “The trouble was, as the cliché goes, no one knows nothing in Hollywood. They all admired A River Runs Through It. But it didn’t make the money The Horse Whisperer made. Bagger Vance was visually akin to River, so there was wariness. Also, to be truthful, DreamWorks’ big hits that summer were Gladiator and Cast Away, two big, starry, showy melodramas. They wanted more of the same from Bob, not a morality tale.”

In November 2000, DreamWorks finally authorized the release of Bagger Vance. The movie previewed in New York the day America cast its vote in the Bush-Gore election. It was not an auspicious day for Redford in any respect. The size of the movie’s failure was considerable. Routinely reviewed as a disappointment, it earned just $30 million, against a production cost of $60 million. Gladiator, by comparison, earned half a billion dollars.

When Redford visited Bali and Java with Bylle a few weeks before the opening of Bagger Vance, with Sundance’s business problems heavy on his mind, he wrote in