“A distortion”: the Will Smith movie that managed to offend an entire religion
Up until he hit the self-destruct button and buttered Chris Rock across the face in front of his peers and an audience of millions, Will Smith was one of Hollywood’s most risk-averse stars.
Having set his sights on the very top since he first decided to make the permanent switch from musician to actor, once he’d solidified his spot as one of the two biggest stars of his era, alongside his perennial arch-nemesis, Tom Cruise, there were usually only two different types of Smith flick.
There were the blockbusters, with most of them earning a pretty penny at the box office, while the occasional Wild Wild West would come along and tank spectacularly, and then there were the awards-baiters, with Ali and The Pursuit of Happyness being countered by the dismal Seven Pounds and the overwrought Collateral Beauty.
Not all of them were winners, but those are basically the only two parameters he’s been found in since the mid-1990s. After his initial hot streak of Bad Boys, Independence Day, Men in Black, and Enemy of the State, Smith sought to diversify for the first time since cracking the A-list, and things didn’t go too well.
In his first straightforward dramatic performance since 1992’s Six Degrees of Separation, he played the title character in Robert Redford’s maudlin fantasy sports film, The Legend of Bagger Vance. Spike Lee certainly wasn’t a fan, accusing Smith and the picture of playing into the ‘Magical Negro’ trope, but he was far from alone.
Redford’s movie recouped less than half of its budget at the box office, making it Smith’s biggest flop by far since he became a household name. Jeremy Leven’s screenplay was adapted from Steven Pressfield’s novel of the same name, which was loosely inspired by the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred text that’s part of the Mahabharata, one of the two most important sacred texts in Hinduism, alongside the Ramayana.
In the text, the god Krishna appears as Bhagavan to assist the warrior and hero Arjuna in embracing his destiny. Of course, for the purposes of the book and its unendingly dull feature-length adaptation, it doesn’t take a genius to see where Bagger Vance got his name, and how it informed his role in the story.
Prior to the film’s release, the National Council of Hindu Temples released a statement decrying the production for that very reason. “Bagger Vance is a distortion of the Hindu word for God; Bhagavad,” it read. “Hindus will find it offensive to see Will Smith on the screen being called what is basically the word for good.”
If there was a silver lining, it was that not many people actually bothered to see The Legend of Bagger Vance on the big screen, which the ticket sales made perfectly clear. It remains one of Smith’s most forgettable outings, yet it still managed to offend a religion.
