Boxing movies take a punch

There comes a moment in ''Million Dollar Baby," the new boxing movie directed by Clint Eastwood, when a calamity befalls Maggie Fitzgerald, the appealing waitress-turned-pugilist played by Hilary Swank. The two old fight guys who care for her -- Frankie Dunn, the tenderhearted crustacean of a trainer played by Eastwood, and Scrap, the ring-worn sage played by Morgan Freeman -- have to decide what, if anything, they can do to help her.

In most of Eastwood's movies, there wouldn't be much doubt about the outcome. He helped set the current standard for manly cinematic heroism by winning one-against-thirty Western gunfights and single-handedly protecting cities from deranged punks and the Bill of Rights, succeeding on-screen no matter how impossible the task he faced. Solving even the gravest problems of one comely southpaw would seem to be child's play for him.

But this time there is doubt -- about the course of the plot, and, more deeply, about what kind of movie we're watching.

The audience's doubt can be traced to the hybrid nature of the boxing movie Eastwood has chosen to make. Because it draws on elements of several different dramatic formulas, each exemplified by a distinct subgenre of boxing movie, ''Million Dollar Baby" inspires more anxiety in an audience than is normal for a Hollywood film, especially one featuring big stars.

When we don't know what to expect from a movie, or when we find ourselves expecting different and contradictory things to happen, we feel a suspense that the usual cliffhangers and chases cannot hope to inspire. ''Million Dollar Baby" confounds familiar formulas by pitting them against one another, deftly setting up an audience for a sentimental KO by making us want first one thing and then another until all we want is for everything to come out all right, even though we know it can't.

To the extent that ''Million Dollar Baby" conforms to the ''Rocky" template of wishful boxing-themed action fantasy, we can expect Eastwood and Freeman to see that their fighter recovers and triumphs. There's plenty of ''Rocky" here, especially during Maggie's rise, as she wins over her skeptical trainer, develops into an adept fighter in just minutes of screen time, blasts out opponents in improbably spectacular ways, and shrugs off incoming blows that would cause an elephant wearing a flak jacket to say ''No ms."

When her dastardly opponent in her biggest fight resorts to extravagant fouls -- a WWE-style elbow smash to the face, punching Maggie when she's down, everything short of setting her on fire -- we know we're in Rocky Land. (This scene will strike fight people as unintentionally comedic because Lucia Rijker, the superb lightweight who plays the hard-pressed opponent, can't disguise the obvious truth that she could destroy Swank with one legal punch.)

But ''Million Dollar Baby" denies us the uncomplicated ''Rocky"-style payoff that such scenes lead us to anticipate. If Rockyism constitutes one strand of boxing-movie subgenre, raising one set of expectations in an audience, there are other strands to reckon with.

Eastwood also takes cues from the quiet, closely observed social realism of John Huston's ''Fat City" (1972), the most humane and least ''Rocky"-like of boxing movies, which explores the fight world as a facet of working-class life. Among the memorable passages of ''Fat City" is a lovely little tone poem about a day's work, in which an opponent comes to town on the bus, passes blood in his urine, passes his medical exam, and preserves his dignity while getting beaten by a local favorite.

At its best, ''Million Dollar Baby" is similarly contemplative and understated, especially in the gym, where it makes small but telling moves to arrive at insights that extend well beyond boxing. When Scrap says that you can back off to get better leverage, but if you back off too far you're not fighting at all, he's talking about both ring craft and the mechanics of friendship, family, and the workplace.

Another relevant strand is the breed of dark parable exemplified by ''The Set-Up" (1949), a tight, lyrical 72-minute noir directed by Robert Wise. In ''The Set-Up," a journeyman stubbornly tries to win a meaningless four-round fight that he's supposed to lose to a prospect. There's an update on the human condition in his seemingly pointless insistence that he matters, despite the crowd's animal cruelty and the grasping monstrousness of fixers.

''Million Dollar Baby" offers its own update, keyed by a series of exchanges in which Frankie corners his long-suffering parish priest after Mass to pick at the technicalities of faith. The routine starts out funny but gradually reveals itself as the moral spine of a movie about love -- including, somewhat amazingly, the problem of why a loving God would allow bad things to happen to good people.

Then there's ''Raging Bull" (1980), an art-movie take on the formula of the fistic biopic. When we see how Maggie and Frankie have fallen away from their respective families and found in violence their only avenue of genuine connection to others, ''Million Dollar Baby" seems to conform to this model.

Like ''Raging Bull," it draws on the metaphorical power of boxing to imagine the arc of a life. ''Some wounds are too deep, too close to the bone" and ''Protect yourself at all times," lines we hear more than once, are elevated from cornermen's lore to philosophical assertions that make us expect Maggie's suffering to deepen and continue.

Swinging drastically in another formulaic direction, ''Million Dollar Baby" is also a weepie, like ''The Champ" (1931), King Vidor's definitive boxing melodrama, which reaches its climax when the hero expires after winning a comeback fight in front of his adoring son. The weepie component of ''Million Dollar Baby" eventually takes over, a surprising development that has won Eastwood widespread praise for his emotional courage and old-fashioned Hollywood sensibility. It also moves audiences, who have audibly sniffled in the dark during the film's climax, which would never happen at a Rocky movie.

Finally, there's the question of whether a separate formula exists for boxing movies built around female fighters. The answer: Not yet. ''Girlfight" (2000), for instance, is three parts ''Rocky," one part ''Raging Bull," and one part ABC ''After School Special." While ''Million Dollar Baby" shares a few elements with ''Girlfight" -- like the theme of bruising familial love and scenes in which a female novice in the gym puts up with hazing from men and eventually wins their respect -- the two female-fighter-centered movies have more in common with their male-fighter-centered sources than with each other.

As it shifts among very different boxing-movie models and the expectations associated with them, ''Million Dollar Baby" makes audiences vulnerable by putting them off balance. It's like what fight people call an ''awkward" fighter, a Michael Spinks of a movie that comes at you from a variety of angles, so that even its most conventional moves can seem perplexingly unconventional.

And, like Spinks, a light-heavyweight who moved up to win the heavyweight title, Eastwood's movie may not seem particularly imposing at first, but its awkwardness makes it deceptively adept at getting to you.

Carlo Rotella, who teaches at Boston College, is the author of "Cut Time: An Education at the Fights."