Million Dollar Baby
The machinery of pop-culture hype is supposed to let us know when great movies are coming. Oscar campaigns get planned months in advance, magazine covers are booked, viral marketing is unleashed into the general populace. Yet "Million Dollar Baby" lands like a sucker punch. Where did this movie come from? Wasn't Clint Eastwood supposed to take the year off after "Mystic River," maybe go on a cruise? Instead, he finished directing his 25th feature in August, quietly edited it through the fall, and first dropped it in moviegoers' laps in the waning days of 2004. At 74, he has made what may well be his finest film.
Yes, it's a boxing movie -- a female boxing movie, which might call up unpleasant memories of Barbra Streisand in "The Main Event" and boneheaded wrastling flicks like "All the Marbles." But it needs to be stressed that the first three-quarters of "Million Dollar Baby" are as entertaining as Hollywood movies get. You sense you're in the hands of a pro, one who can honor the cliches of a genre even as he reinvents them, and one who's still moved simply by the way people connect. So when the time comes to go into the dark -- and "Baby" goes so far into the dark as to take your breath away -- you put your trust in the filmmaker and follow along.
"Million Dollar Baby" also features a trio of heavyweight performances, from Eastwood himself as grizzled LA fight manager Frankie Dunn, Hilary Swank as Maggie Fitzgerald, the no-hope boxer he warily takes under his wing, and Morgan Freeman as Scrap Dupris, a one-eyed ex-palooka who runs Frankie's gym and provides the movie's narration and moral spine.
Moth-eaten stereotypes all, and brought to life by top-notch writing and acting. The plot is so old I don't even have to describe it, and anyway the joy is in the details. Eastwood makes Frankie a close-cropped silver fox -- a Catholic who can't bring himself to believe, a lapsed Irishman who keeps dipping into Yeats for reassurance -- while Swank proves her "Boys Don't Cry" Oscar wasn't a fluke by throwing herself deeply, avidly into her role.
Maggie's a hick from the Ozarks -- "She grew up knowing one thing: she was trash," says Scrap's voice-over -- and at 31, after a career waiting on tables, she has dispensed with all illusions except the one where she can make it big in the ring.
Swank gives the character a down-and-dirty coonhound accent and her eyes glint with mischief, but you can see the panic back there, too. That's what Maggie's punching away at, and Frankie, after some stalling, comes to prize it and hone it.
There follows much boxing-movie advice on the order of "It's not about hitting hard, but how good you hit." There's also a lot of girls-will-be-boys macho banter and the de rigueur training montage. But, miraculously, everything works in "Million Dollar Baby." That montage is goosed by a strummed acoustic guitar rather than triumphant gonna-fly-now horns (the score, composed by Eastwood, is much more supple than the one he did for "Mystic River"). And the dialogue feels well-worn rather than worn out.
One of the reasons is that the film's source stories, written by ringside "cut man" Jerry Boyd under the name F.X. Toole and published in the collection "Rope Burns," come from a life lived. The other, primary reason is that Eastwood and Swank clearly love their characters and their characters love each other.
This isn't a romance, though, not of the bedroom variety. It's richer, and, for that matter, bloodier. "Million Dollar Baby" doesn't shy away from what a fist can do to a human face, even one as lovely and stubborn as Maggie's. The fight scenes are fast, lithe, and nasty, and when a nose gets broken, Eastwood keeps the camera right in there as the cartilage gets snapped back into place.
He keeps it there, too, when "Baby" suddenly pirouettes from the sunshine into the night. I won't tell you what happens -- in fact, I'd rather you put the newspaper down right now and come back only after you've seen the movie. I will say that for about 10 or 20 minutes you may be convinced that Eastwood has lost his mind, and that he has squandered the movie's smart, lusty vibe on the treacle of a tear-jerker.
But he keeps going further and further, and slowly the wind fills the movie's sails again. Some in the audience will be lost for good, but that's the nature of risk. Others may realize that the bleakness has shape and a purpose, and that it's more unyielding, more mature, than most American movies can begin to contemplate.
"Million Dollar Baby" ultimately emerges into a cold light far from the bromides and consolations of Hollywood: What begins as a lark ends as a meditation on the costs of faith. You may carry this movie with you for quite some time, turning over its unspoken meanings. It's a film that rejects the church for the parishioners, that walks away from God and toward people, and that unexpectedly ascends to a battered, anonymous grace. More than "Unforgiven," more than "Mystic River," it is Clint Eastwood's autumnal masterpiece.
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