Review: Million Dollar Baby
Million Dollar Baby
Starring Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman
Directed by Clint Eastwood
4 stars (out of 4)
Geoffrey: “You fool. As if it matters how a man falls down.”
Richard: “When the fall is all that’s left, it matters a great deal.”
—The Lion in Winter (1968)
On the heels of last year’s Mystic River, director Clint Eastwood offers up Million Dollar Baby, a simple elegy more reminiscent of his Oscar-winner Unforgiven (1992). Eastwood stars as aging boxing trainer Frankie Dunn, but he’s really William Munny resurrected: one man, damned and riding the plains looking for salvation, performing rituals of atonement even though none ever comes.
“Everything in boxing is backward,” we learn from Frankie’s partner Eddie “Scrap Iron” Dupris (Morgan Freeman), with whom Frankie runs a small gym. Scrap narrates the film, bearing witness and recounting the events to someone we will learn about later. And indeed, things do seem to be backward, with very little sweet left to the science: Frankie’s best fighter leaves him after an 8-year partnership to be with a manager who’ll give him a title fight; Frankie hasn’t seen his daughter in years, and all his letters to her come back unopened; and Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) shows up asking Frankie to train her, despite being, at 31, too old to begin training.
Maggie has no friends, and her family back in Missouri consists of a lazy mother, Earline (Margo Martindale), and cruel siblings who mock her even as they leech money from her. She waits tables, saving the scraps for herself. Frankie eventually gives into her persistence and begins to train her, and what happens to them over the next year and a half is the stuff of heartbreak and beauty, of love and loss, and of man’s simple attempts to achieve ever greater heights. Maggie fights because it’s all she knows, and for that reason she becomes one of the greatest fighters Frankie has ever trained.
The only thing Frankie does regularly, besides train fighters, is attend daily Mass and ask pointedly annoying questions of his priest. Frankie’s playful impieties are met with constant scorn from Father Horvak (Brian O’Byrne), a younger man too concerned with other things to genuinely care about an old trainer. Frankie says he’s been writing regular letters to his daughter, a truth Horvak doesn’t believe because he’s already made up his mind about the old man. It’s no wonder Frankie’s faith needs mending: he’s been turned away by the one organization that’s supposed to accept everybody.
Earline and Horvak are the film’s nods to convention, each a two-dimensional force provided to progress the plot or let the characters express their feelings. Unfortunately, too much weight is given to Earline and not enough to Horvak; she plays a substantial role that doesn’t need to exist, and he is tragically underused as Frankie searches for hope and finds none offered. Families and churches are pretty big on abandoning their own in the world of Million Dollar Baby, leaving us to forge our own networks of support in whatever ways we can.
A slim young man, nicknamed Danger (Jay Baruchel), also works out regularly at Frankie’s gym; he’s a sweet-natured, loud-mouthed Texas boy who proclaims he’s training for the welterweight championship. Most of the other fighters mock him, but Scrap is content to let him box air and show up whenever he wants. Scrap knows that Danger is harmless but loyal, and letting him work out at the gym hurts no one and gives Danger a sense of belonging. One night a group of fighters jump Danger in the ring, beating the pup bloody until Scrap rushes in to stop what would be the senseless murder of another mockingbird. Scrap picks the boy up, telling him: “Anybody can lose one fight. You’ll be back, Danger.” This moment exposes the film’s heart, the slowly beating thread that runs through it all. The big moments are unavoidable; it’s what we do right after them that defines us, and determines what our lives will be.
Eastwood celebrates his 75th birthday this year, and Freeman will turn 68. Too rarely do films show older actors playing characters their own age; a lesser producer would want to pair Eastwood and Swank as love interests, apparently convinced that the audience will swallow anything. But Frankie’s eventual love for Maggie is different, deeper, than that: she is his family, his blood, his darling. The two become family in every best sense of the word: each a place for the other to find something they’d lost.
The film ends much differently than you’d think, but Clint Eastwood would never make Rocky. Million Dollar Baby is a hard film, one that literally pulls no punches, but a film worth seeing and celebrating for its honesty. I will not obviously enter here into details of the film’s final act, except to say that Eastwood has sewn together parts that form a much greater whole, a story of the truth of human emotion and the chances we are bound by fate to take.
