Review
MILLION DOLLAR BABY
Starring Hilary Swank, Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Opens Friday, January 28
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In Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood’s gritty, sombre film about an aging boxing trainer who unwillingly takes on a female fighter, the usual metaphors about pugilism take on a strikingly potent and heartbreaking face. Cast in shadows and paced methodically, like his last film, the Oscar-winning Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby is a taut and gut-wrenching look at life, one that is refreshingly bereft of the slick Hollywood veneer that so often covers cinematic examinations of this sort. A rich character study simple in its poignancy and heart, Million Dollar Baby feels like a hard punch to the solar plexus even though it plays out as a bitter, 12-round fight.
Eddie Dupris (Morgan Freeman), an ex-boxer who narrates the film and runs Eastwood’s run-down L.A. gym, says that Maggie (Hillary Swank), the plucky young woman who shows up looking for a manager, was "from somewhere between nowhere and goodbye." This is where Million Dollar Baby seems to exist.
Eastwood’s Frankie Dunn is a grisly grandfather of boxing, who’s taken on more than his fair share of fighters. Unable to watch the men he’s trained get hurt, Frankie refuses to take on the biggest bouts. His approach, which is not in anyone’s best financial interests, costs him a chance at the heavyweight championship early in the film – Frankie watches as the man he’s trained for years abandons him for a manager who will take him to the big show.
When the headstrong Maggie shows up at Frankie’s gym, begging him to train her and refusing to leave (even after he’s told her she’s too old at 31 to have any kind of decent career), Dunn acquiesces. Dupris describes Maggie as a girl who knew she was trash and, in the accompanying image, we see her stealing a half-eaten steak from the restaurant where she waitresses. Dirt poor and with no family to speak of, Maggie readily admits that she has nothing in this life but her love of fighting.
Although Million Dollar Baby has the usual peaks and valleys of a film about a nobody who becomes a somebody, it’s no mere rags-to-riches story. Nor is it a story about two people who come together and heal one another. Maggie doesn’t save Frankie, anymore than he saves her. They’re both essentially alone – he has a daughter who returns his weekly letters unopened and she has a despicable mother who lives in a trailer – and in their time together the salvation they find is in having somebody. It may be fleeting and it may not be much, but it’s something.
Perhaps the best thing about Million Dollar Baby is the way it characterizes the transformation of Maggie into a professional-calibre boxer. As she enters the ring and knocks out woman after woman, almost always in the first round, there is little hoopla and fanfare to follow. She wins some money, which Frankie tells her to save, but she ultimately spends it on a house for her mother (who thanks her by complaining that a new house will complicate her welfare scam). And the venues she fights in always seem small and cheap.
Of course, for Maggie, the money (what little there is of it) and the nominal fame don’t matter. It’s the fighting that keeps her going and that brings her together with Frankie. And, since boxing is so often used as a metaphor for everything else in life, it’s particularly powerful here in its original context.
Dupris says early on that people like to say the most important thing a fighter can have is heart, but Frankie always said this was bullshit. A fighter with a lot of heart and no talent is in for a beating. This is what Million Dollar Baby reminds us, in beautiful fashion. Although we’d like to believe that heart is what guides boxers through the ring the way it takes us through life, it’s never enough on its own. We get knocked around no matter what. Although this film is undoubtedly about people with heart, that’s not what makes them important. Million Dollar Baby reminds us that the path to redemption is in finding something to love somewhere between nowhere and goodbye. |
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