Perhaps drawing inspiration from elements of two of the best sports movies (both about baseball) – the “returning to the game after years away” aspect of The Natural and some of mystical elements of Field of Dreams, Robert Redford’s The Legend of Bagger Vance tried this with a different sport, golf. While the film – starring Will Smith as a caddy who mysteriously appears to offer help to a golfer (Matt Damon) returning to the game years after his WWI-induced trauma forced him to ditch it – didn’t attract much praise, and indeed was quite heavily criticised for its handling of race – it did inspire one marvellous thing, which is Rachel Portman’s beautiful score.
She was riding the crest of a wave around the turn of the century (this film was released in 2000), winning lots of fans in particular for her very distinctive brand of music for romantic dramas and comedies, having become the first woman ever to win an Oscar for film music in the mid-1990s for Emma.
While some have likened her music to that of John Barry, I think the more pertinent comparison is perhaps with Georges Delerue. Delerue was a special composer and he actually had a very wide range, but perhaps the thing most associated with him was his very special gift for writing warm melodies – instantly-memorable, often bouncy themes when the film called for it, something that Portman has also done more times than I can count.
Of all her great themes, The Legend of Bagger Vance is right up there with the best. It’s actually a little different in one respect – rather than strings or (most typically) winds carrying the melody, in the title cue which opens the score on the album it is the trumpet which carries it. Otherwise, it’s cut from the same cloth as Only You and The Cider House Rules and so on – full of joy, a real ear-worm, just about guaranteed to put a smile on any face. While this is not a romantic drama, it’s perhaps that slight instrumental adjustment that allowed the style to work so well for what is intended to be an inspirational sports film.
The fairly short score (which takes up 40 minutes on the album, presented alongside a handful of period songs) isn’t as monothematic as it is sometimes made out to be (and indeed, as some of Portman’s other scores are). While the different themes pretty much all share the same DNA and indeed some of them evolve from the same basic melodic start, there are some distinctive other tunes here. In “Bagger Offers to Caddy for Junuh” there’s a string theme which appears (disappointingly briefly) mid-cue and brings more warmth; then in the subsequent “Bagger & Hardy Measure the Course at Night” a far more wistful theme, recalling the more sedate moments of her wonderful score for Chocolat, appears – complete, very unusually for Portman, with a choir which offers a heavenly accompaniment to what is a really wonderful piece of music.
Not only is it not monothematic, the score is also not monostylistic. While admittedly there is a fair bit of the very warm style which is exuded in particular by the main theme (and that is no bad thing), there are also a few trademark Portman comic scherzos thrown in – briefly in “Savannah Needs a Hero”, and at the end of both “Junuh Sees the Field” and “Junuh Comes Out of the Woods”. The start of “The Day of the Match Dawns” is full of a nervous energy, and there is a particular whimsy to “Birdie”.
Both “Junuh Sees the Field” and “Junuh Comes Out of the Woods” (until the scherzo comes in – both times!) slowly build both in orchestral forces and tempo as they progress. As she has done so often, in the former Portman starts with a simple piano melody tentatively suggesting a feeling before the strings and other sections begin to be laid on top (and that choir is present again in both cues). In the latter, the opening is darker, a trumpet solo evoking a particular loneliness before the piano comes in and the magic starts to happen. And there really is a magic to what she does here, perfectly capturing the mystical/spiritual elements of the story. Those two cues sandwich one of the biggest uplifting cues, a great, fast-paced take on the main theme in “Hole in One”.
The mysticism really comes to the fore in the gorgeous “Bagger Leaves” before a kind of militaristic, flag-waving feeling comes with the introduction of drums and the brass section; the end of the cue continues the militaristic influence, but now with a kind of elegiac feel to it. After this, the composer brings things full circle with a great big reprise of the main theme for the finale, “Old Hardy Joins Bagger at the Sea”.
I find that the older and (arguably, anyway) more mature I get, the more I’m in love with the music of Rachel Portman. This score is now a quarter of a century old and, while I never did write about this one in particular back when it was released (when I was in my early twenties), I read back on some of the ones I did write about and find that I essentially kept saying that they were too repetitive, too similar to each other. I was wrong. These scores are absolutely magical and it’s a real shame that Portman doesn’t get to do many of them these days (her film work has become increasingly rare, and not very often on films that allow her to work in this style any more – though she has written several outstanding concert works in recent years). The Legend of Bagger Vance is probably as good as any of them – so warm, so full of heart, so completely joyful. In fact, it’s pretty much perfect.
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