***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, and Morgan Freeman
Directed by Clint Eastwood & written for the screen by Paul Haggis, from short stories by F.X. Toole
2004
137 min R
If there is one word to describe what "Million Dollar Baby" does so well, it's "breathe." In the broad outlines of its plot, there's nothing unpredictable about its first two acts. But the movie is paced so well—it breathes so deeply—that we are given time to know the characters, their motivations, and the places where they live and work. Director Clint Eastwood is economical, direct, unsentimental, and he never calls attention to himself or to any shot (in many ways, he is the antithesis of his great mentor Sergio Leone). This is traditional filmmaking at its finest: we are shown characters, we are given time to know them, we care about what happens to them next, and we learn something about ourselves watching them in the extremes of human experience.
This is also a film characterized by the old, the worn-down, the lined, and the rusty. Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman play retired boxers and, wow, do they look it. Wrinkled, fleshy, grizzled, yet still powerful and confident in word and movement, perhaps the most that they've ever been. Like the movie itself, they say what they mean and mean what they say, and not a word more. "Million Dollar Baby" finds the two of them running a gym of the same color and dilapidation as the Boston in Eastwood's "Mystic River." It's California, but it's the part of California that apparently looks like some crappy Midwestern steel town. There's not a location in this movie that doesn't look old and lived in; paint chips, corrogated metal rusts, and greyish floors stain. Clint writes letters to a
daughter who returns them unopened and Morgan sleeps in rusted cell in the gym. They have issues.
Enter Hilary Swank. She's too old to start boxing but she's too determined to quit. Why is she so determined? Because she has nothing else. She's been waiting tables since she was 13 and living off chunks of change and what she can scrape off dirty plates. Life has passed her by. Clint doesn't train girls not so much because he's
opposed to girls boxing but because you don't want a NASCAR mechanic working on a semi-truck. He's too old to change his medium. But she won't go away and, as her trainers, he begins the process of beating her down and building her back up. Together they gradually work their way up the women's boxing circuit, butting heads and regaining their damaged dignity. What happens in the third act I will not reveal, except to say that most movies are about redeeming ourselves through action to make up for past mistakes. "Million Dollar Baby" changes gears to show us that sometimes there is nothing we can do but come to terms with what we've done wrong.
Because this is movie boxing, we can get in close and get to see about three times as many punches as in a real boxing match. "Million Dollar Baby" also has time to teach us how the sport works, not just how punches are thrown, but the rhythm, philosophy, and allure of the game. Clint dispenses real (or at least real-sounding) training, and not just Obi-Wan platitudes. Watching Swank up late night after night, punching her bag, I came to realize that for her it was no different than any other skill we learn in solitude—painting, a musical instrument, gardening, whatever. For her, it becomes a myopic obsession, giving her life shape and meaning.
It's surprising that a man who came to fame blowing hippies away with a .44 Magnum has become such an actor's director (Clint's "Mystic River" won Oscars for Sean Penn and Tim Robbins last year). The three leads in "Million Dollar Baby" are destined for kudos come Oscar time. A sign of a good peformance is that we believe a character has lived an entire lifetime even as he only vaguely alludes to what happened in it. Morgan Freeman, especially, is good to see back in action; after being called the "best actor in America" by Pauline Kael, he seemed to take a decade off by making nothing but police procedurals. Even the supporting cast—most of them two-or-three scene walk-ons—seem to have been a part of the rusty city or the boxing ring for years and years. The priest, the other boxers, the other trainers; the movie lets us feel we've met everyone.
Perhaps "Million Dollar Baby's" only misstep is in its decision to have villains. The need for us to feel a specific person is wronging us, and to then see that person destroyed, is one of the things we like about fiction. With its third act twist, "Million Dollar Baby" successfully dashes our hopes about the fictional hope of a "second chance that makes everything okay," forcing Clint to instead face who he is. This kind of gritty realism doesn't sit well with overt villainy. I'm not complaining about Swank's German nemesis in a title bout—ferocious, powerful, and actually pretty sexy—but about her family, a loud, boorish archetype of fat redneck insensitivity. When Swank's mother and siblings hear she's in trouble, they come to visit, but only after stopping at Universal Studios first. The movie could have probably accomplished what it needed to by making them more subtle and less loutish. They could have been as human as the boxers and the clergy, and not just cardboard. My issue with the bully around the gym is the same, although the comeuppance he gets from Morgan Freeman is pretty satisfying.
As I write this, "Million Dollar Baby" has just added the Golden Globe for best director to its list of awards. It and Alexander Payne's "Sideways" are locked in mortal combat for the big prize at the Oscars this year, with Scorsese's "The Aviator" not far behind. Was it only a year ago that a teenage special effects bonanza claimed Hollywood's most prestigious prizes? "Million Dollar Baby" and "Sideways" couldn't be further from "Lord of the Rings:" they are not epics, they are not about special effects, they are not billion-dollar crowd pleasers, and they are not about children. They are about middle-aged men, at some degree of accepting that their lives will not be the spectacular stuff of the stories they heard when they were younger. O, how the pendulum does like to swing.
Finished Saturday January 22nd, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday and Saturday Night
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