director
Clint Eastwood
screenwriter
Paul Haggis
based on
stories by
F.X. Toole
producers
Clint Eastwood
Paul Haggis
Tom Rosenberg
Albert S. Ruddy
cinematographer
Tom Stern
music
Clint Eastwood
editor
Joel Cox
cast
Clint Eastwood (Frankie Dunn)
Hilary Swank (Maggie Fitzgerald)
Morgan Freeman (Scrap)
Jay Baruchel (Danger Barch)
Mike Colter (Big Willie Little)
Lucia Rijker (Billie 'The Blue Bear')
Ned Eisenberg (Sally Mendoza)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 137m
u.s.
release: 12/15/04 (limited)
u.s.
release: 1/28/05 (wide)
video
availability: TBA
official website
other clint
eastwood films
reviewed on this website:
- absolute
power
- blood
work
- midnight
in the garden
of good and evil
- mystic
river
- space
cowboys
- true
crime
- unforgiven
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Over the past few years, I've
said a few times that Clint Eastwood is in the Autumnal stage
of his career -- the period wherein his movies have started coming
to grips with old age, loss, death. Million Dollar Baby,
which a lot of people are convinced is his masterpiece, may be
Eastwood's most Autumnal work yet: gritty, dark, melancholy,
on speaking terms with failure and regret. By now, Eastwood and
his longstanding tight unit of collaborators are incapable of
making a slipshod movie; this one is, as usual with Clint, measured
and solid and expertly acted. But it left me cold nonetheless.
Eastwood is attempting something major here, but the script isn't
complex enough to support it, and nobody here really does anything
he or she hasn't done before.
Consider the heroine, Maggie
Fitzgerald, a poor but plucky Southern gal played by Hilary Swank
at her pluckiest. Maggie, at 31, wants to be a boxer. She may
not have the moves yet, but she has Heart, and, as a century
of sports movies will tell you, Heart is all you need. Maggie
comes from bona fide White Trash, characterized here with possibly
the most blatant set of caricatures in any Eastwood-directed
film since Sudden Impact. But Maggie herself is Good and
Pure, with scarcely a flicker of ambition or greed clouding her
path. She just wants to Be Someone. She just wants to Fight.
Eastwood, as creaky "cut
man" and gym owner Frankie Dunn, just wants to Be Left Alone.
Yes, Clint is the Irascible Old Coot Who Won't Give Our Heroine
a Chance. But Maggie keeps coming to the gym, and before long,
Frankie's old friend and gym janitor Scrap (Morgan Freeman) starts
sneaking her lessons after hours. Oh, what a challenging role
this is for Morgan Freeman, who gets to Be Wise and Keep His
Own Counsel and Narrate the Movie. Scrap is an old softy, and,
it turns out, so is Frankie, who eventually consents to train
Maggie.
There is a Training Montage.
There are Decisive Boxing Matches, most of which Maggie wins
in the first round. There is Foreshadowing: Frankie has a thing
about not taking risks with his fighters, because of Scrap's
own Sad Backstory involving the loss of sight in his right eye.
There is even a Villain, in the person of dirty-fighting former
prostitute Billie "The Blue Bear" (Lucia Rijker), this
movie's Mr. T to Maggie's Rocky. Billie is so black she has cornrows,
and has a nasty habit of sucker-punching her opponents even after
they've fallen to the canvas. We know, unless this is our first
movie, that Maggie and Billie are due for a clash of the titans.
What we may not foresee is
the Plot Twist, of which much has been made. Don't worry, I won't
spoil it. It certainly kicks Million Dollar Baby off its
expected track, turning the movie into a lugubrious meditation
on Life and the Meaning of Same. A priest is consulted. The movie's
already dark lighting scheme goes all the way into shadow. Eastwood
holds melodrama at arm's length with his usual leathery reserve,
but it lurks in the movie's corners. Maggie's family is brought
on for more jeering, accompanied by a Sleazy Lawyer. Eastwood
may be trying for archetypes here, the way he did in Unforgiven,
but in that movie (which I consider his true masterpiece) he
dug around inside the archetypes, casting off the mythological
cobwebs that had gathered around them. This movie replaces that
with lazy screenwriting (based on stories by F.X. Toole, which
I haven't read); it's as if scripter Paul Haggis took a hard
left turn towards catastrophe because he didn't know any other
way to avoid a clichéd finale, but he just trades one
cliché for another.
Million Dollar Baby is certainly a somber enough piece
of work to explain all the accolades and award nominations. But,
to paraphrase Frankie, somber ain't enough. This is Eastwood's
weakest work in years, perhaps because it yokes itself to a hot-button
theme instead of a story that resonates. I also think the movie
might've been more touching with a cast of unknowns: The reason
we were able to buy Sylvester Stallone as a broken-down, below-poverty-level
contender in the first Rocky is that, at the time, that
wasn't far from his reality. Stallone also managed to write a
denouement (if we forget about the sequels) in which failure
and realism co-existed with triumph and a dream fulfilled. Here,
we have rich Hollywood actors shuffling around in the gloom of
expensively grimy sets, pretending they live there, and at the
end, the characters have to pretend to make a hard choice, though,
when you think about it later, the script leaves them no other
choice.
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