Release Date: December 15, 2004
Starring: Hilary Swank, Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman
Directed by: Clint Eastwood
Written by: Paul Haggis
Distributed by: Warner Brothers
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (violence, some disturbing images, thematic material, language)
One of the things people like about reading John Steinbeck is that he dealt in the poetry of simplicity, as though he were aware that it would only be an uphill battle to draw subtlety or subtext from something as plain as the American dream. I do not know whether Clint Eastwood has read any Steinbeck, but you would certainly think it from the way that he has filmed his tragic drama Million Dollar Baby. Many people will call this a boxing movie, but the only way to get a boxing movie made in Hollywood today is if it’s not really about boxing. This means that what Million Dollar Baby is really about is the American dream, and fathers and daughters, and big chances and missed opportunities, and a host of other things, all shot in an unpretentious vernacular that Steinbeck would have appreciated. You don’t need to manufacture symbolism and poetry when the thing itself is good enough.
It begins, more or less, at the Hit Pit, a second-rate boxing gym in East Los Angeles run by Frankie Dunn (Eastwood) and his best friend, a former fighter named Eddie Dupris (Morgan Freeman), a pair of weathered old men who each have their emotional burdens to carry around: Eddie lost his title shot and his right eye in the process, and Frankie, who was in Eddie’s corner for that fight, has also become estranged from his daughter. In the background, the Hit Pit is populated by the usual, colorful assortment of gym rats, the kind who seem like they are sold in a variety pack at the supermarket. It is the sort of place where people like Frankie and Eddie can hide from the world and the trouble they have made for themselves in it.
But anonymity (and homogeneity) goes down for the count when Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) walks in. She is a determined, tough-as-nails émigré from Missouri, who is eager to turn her unbridled passion into something more technically sound, the stuff of a champion, under Frankie’s tutelage. Frankie says no, and Maggie says we’ll see about that, and continues to show up at his gym day after day, pounding the heavy bag in a literal show of stubbornness.
Eventually, Eddie -- who narrates the story in a world-weary string of metaphors and aphorisms (“Show me a fighter with heart, and I’ll show you a sucker waiting for a beating” and “He had a left hook that could move a tank” ) -- convinces Frankie to take Maggie under his wing after watching her stay at the gym past closing time every evening. These late-night scenes are some of the movie’s best, because they illustrate the extraordinary visual poetry a director like Eastwood can coax from some of the simplest filmmaking devices, like light and shadow. In one, Eddie shows Maggie how to train with the heavy bag: treat it like a person, he says, giving it a gentle swing, as it moves away from you, toward you, all around you. The big bag casts shadows on Eddie and Maggie as the camera rotates slowly around them, creating a scene that is just as beautiful for its literal qualities as it is for its symbolic ones.
Ironically, Frankie prefers reading the poetry of Yeats (in Gaelic, no less), a literary giant who would seem at odds with the movie’s devotion to the earthy, sweaty realism of the gym and the ring (you can almost smell the canvas in the scenes inside the Hit Pit). But Yeats, an Irishman, is a great poet for a boxing movie, and for Eastwood, who has, as in Mystic River, given his movie a constant, almost intravenous, sense of Irish Catholic fatalism and guilt. Yeats once told a London newspaper that some people say there is no God and others say there is; but the truth lies somewhere between, a statement that adequately sums up Frankie’s faith: He gets a kick out of riling up his parish priest asking him to explain the seemingly contradictory tenets of Catholicism, but he goes to Mass every day and says his prayers every night, desperately asking God for the forgiveness he can never give himself.
This explains why he is so reluctant to take on Maggie: Because he has been deeply wounded, twice, over people he loves, and he is not eager to reach out again. (Certainly, it’s not because he’s too busy, as he never seems to do anything except find excuses for verbal sparring matches with Eddie.) But Maggie is persistent, which makes this an ideal part for Swank, who has clearly spent some time with a personal trainer to meet the physical requirements as well. Her critics have made an issue of her apparent attachment to roles with a masculine edge -- she broke into the business with The Next Karate Kid and won an Oscar for Boys Don’t Cry -- but the truth is that Swank mixes masculinity and femininity into an intriguing, realistic composite that few other actresses can match. She makes traditional gender roles obsolete, and, for a movie like this, irrelevant. It’s exactly the sort of approach necessary to remove the leering unseemliness from the sight of two women beating each other bloody.
Initially, Maggie and Frankie seem to get on alright. Their bond forms out of the possibly misguided sense that, in each other, they have the chance to right all of their previous wrongs: Maggie becomes a surrogate daughter for Frankie, and, with Frankie’s help, Maggie attempts to restore some measure of success to the deadbeat lives of her white trash family in Missouri by sending them money from the purses she wins (with Frankie’s help, she is, of course, unbeatable in the ring). But Million Dollar Baby, written by Paul Haggis and based on the stories of F.X. Toole, is a tragedy, and things do not always go this well. It would ruin the film for those who have not seen it to say what this third-act tragedy is, but it is as simple, devastating, and unexpected as one of Maggie’s first-round knockout punches. I will say that it forces Maggie and Frankie to view their relationship from an entirely new perspective, but even that is an understatement, as those who have seen it will know.
Part of the reason that this tragedy shatters the viewer’s complacency so completely is that Eastwood has left little else in the movie to focus on, much as Steinbeck’s spare prose rarely distracted the viewer’s imagination. Eastwood also did this in Mystic River, but the difference between that movie (the better of the two) and this one is that Mystic built up to its final, tragic act in a slow, painful, inexorable burn -- you could almost see it coming, two hours away, and the sad thing about it was that you knew you could do nothing to stop it. If you watch Million Dollar Baby before you have read any reviews or plot summaries, however, then the movie’s third-act haymaker will come out of a cinematic blind spot, more shocking than tragic. Regardless of your comparative views on the two films, however, it’s clear that Eastwood has begun an unexpected but extraordinary new phase of his career, a modern-day Aeschylus for a Hollywood arguably in need of one. In fact his two tragedies -- two of the best pictures of his career -- work best not in competition but side-by-side: Mystic River grand and heartbreaking, Million Dollar Baby intimate and piercing.
There will be the usual crowd of moviegoers who are left baffled by the praise deservingly heaped upon this movie; why, they will ask, would you want to go to the movies to be so thoroughly, emotionally decimated? But Million Dollar Baby is not just a tragedy, and it is more than a film, too. It is also Eastwood’s statement of defiance, a history lesson made plain to a flashy, youth-obsessed industry, and successful for the same reason that people still read Steinbeck, 70 years after the fact. Simplicity is as effective as it is timeless.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)