Warner Home Video VHS & DVD
2 hrs 14 mins
Director: Clint Eastwood
I do not care for Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby.” It’s slow and predictable, masked in the auteur cloak that critics seem to drape over most of Eastwood’s films. To complete my callousness, I also did not care for “Mystic River,” “Blood Work,” “Absolute Power,” “The Bridges of Madison County,” “Space Cowboys,” “The Rookie” or “A Perfect World” and most others he has directed. Eastwood’s films feel empty and contrite – exercises in passivity. Strangely, Eastwood also seems to have lost the macho, weirdly Californian easiness of his earlier films. In exchange, he may have grown technically as an artist but not emotionally. His films now seem so still, so stoic, that you may wonder if he has confused older wisdom with mediocrity, and that same tone runs through the veins of “Million Dollar Baby.”
The film is a rags-to-riches story with a tacked on, almost shameless bite at the end of the film. It is the story of Frankie Dunn (Eastwood in a variation of his gruff old veteran), who is a boxing manager in his twilight with a gym that has seen better days. His best friend Eddie Dupris (dependable Morgan Freeman) watches Frankie day in and day out, struggling against the mistakes of his past that have ended in his daughter’s estrangement. Into his gym one day walks Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), a 30-something waitress whose only dream is to become a professional boxer. “I don’t train girls,” Eastwood growls, yet she shows up every day at the gym to punch the bag.
Over time Eddie takes to Maggie and shows her the basics (Eddie being a fighter whose former manager was Frankie). Meanwhile, Frankie is dumped by his up-and-coming fighter and, with nothing to lose, begins to train Maggie to fight professionally. Their story is punctuated by a fight and then character development, repeated over and over. The drama consists of Maggie, a trailer-park-raised hick, who must fight against her and her own family’s ignorance by boxing (!?). There is a fateful fight, however, that changes both her and Frankie’s destinies and also sparked the most inane controversy surrounding this film that makes me suspect that it wasn’t dreamt up by the film’s advertising machine.
What makes me really criticize “Million Dollar Baby” is its laziness masked in high melodrama. For example, Maggie’s family is presented as hick-evil incarnate, ready to suck Maggie dry; Maggie herself is some sort of angel, wrapped in a type of Victorian virginity; boxing stereotypes such as the down-and-out friend and evil fighter abound with no real service to the story. Instead of embellishing the boxing myths for impact, such as Stallone’s “Rocky” films, “Million Dollar Baby” embalms them.
To be fair, “Million Dollar Baby” has its moments: The shots of Maggie shadow boxing in the empty gym (courtesy of the muted palette by cinematographer Tom Stern); Frankie seen from the back through the fogged window of an all night diner; the jarring cut of a chair before a fatal fall in the ring; but all are just small moments in a film that always seems to float above its audience in some punch-drunk haze, expecting us to feel, instead of earning our attentions.
–Joe Ramirez
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