Hey folks, Harry here - It has been a while since I've read a more positive review of a film from Roger Ebert as he gave MILLION DOLLAR BABY. (Click Here To Read) However, our New York film investigator and all around irresistable charmer, has a rather different and less enthusiastic take on the film. Here ya go...
Million Dollar Baby
directed by Clint Eastwood
screenplay by Paul Haggis
from stories by F. X. Toole
2004
Sheldrake here, reporting from Times Square in New York City.
Tonight I caught Clint Eastwood’s new movie, Million Dollar Baby. As Quentin Tarantino might say, hey, there’s Clint, boxing and Girl Power! What could go wrong?
Before we deal with that, here’s the story, without spoilers.
As the story opens we meet Clint Eastwood’s character Franky. He trains boxers, runs the kind of run down one-ring boxing gym you can smell right on the screen. Morgan Freeman, an old boxer with a glass eye, his reward for staying in the the ring one fight too many, takes care of the gym and sleeps in a back room. Franky’s managing one good fighter, Willie, but he’s being over-cautious with him. Won’t give him his shot at the big title fight. One day a woman (but she somehow comes off as a girl), Maggie, comes into the gym and starts taking swings at the bag. Maggie’s there because she has nowhere else in the world to go, and she’s there because if she’s ever going to save herself and take her chance, it’s going to have to be now. She moves ok, looks like she might have some talent, but she’s old (32) and she’s obviously not a trained fighter. Something happens that changes Frank’s relationship with Willie, and after due protestation, Franky takes on Maggie as his next fighter. He trains her, then begins to get her small fights, four rounders at first, then six. She keeps winning, and soon her fortunes change. Franky takes his “girl boxer” to other venues, American and European, and keeps winning. And then one day, it’s all on the table: she gets the big fight against the Woman’s Welterweight Champion of the World. By the end of that fight, Maggie will have accomplished her goal as a fighter, but her life will be permanently changed, and the rest of the movie deals with the consequences of that change for her and for Franky, and the movie ends with the girl asking Franky for a favor, the favor he least wants to grant her.
Most of the fun in this movie is in the training and fight scenes. There’s a kind of predictable enjoyment to these scenes – the crusty drill sergeant beats his troops into submission, then rewards them by taking them on a mission. (Hey, that was one of my VERY favorite movies this year – the amazing Simaldo). Or, in this case, the crusty old boxer beats his headstrong boxer into submission then takes her into the Big Fight. The enjoyment comes from watching her wear down his resistance as she forces herself into his masculine world, and in watching her development as a figher. I appreciated Clint Eastwood’s and Morgan Freeman’s performances, but I was surprised at how artificial—how written--much of the small talk seemed, the dialogue on cheap bleach coming to mind in particular. I could also have lived without Morgan’s voice-over. He did it better, and the story supported it better, in The Shawshank Redemption, because we never saw Andy from inside, always through the eyes of other people (until the end). But in this story we’re fully participating in Franky’s story, and the moral-center voice-over is a needless distraction.
Which is pretty much what’s wrong with this film—it lacks confidence in it’s own story. When I first saw Hillary Swank hammering that bag in the gym, I was deeply moved—without a word of dialogue, we knew that this was a woman who had no place to be, that her life held no meaning or promise. That’s a great story for a boxer. Having the dialogue underline that point, though, wasted the moment and made it sentimental. The movie’s setups and payoffs, particularly regarding Franky’s relationship to a priest and to his daughter, were mechanical. When my friend and I left the theater we talked about how, though we’d cried some during the movie, we felt manipulated by the director into these feelings. Either he hadn’t earned them, or, once he’d earned them, he hadn’t left well enough alone.
I wish I could be more positive about the movie. There was a great story here, a story about the way accidental relationships can change us forever, the kind of platonic love and older man and young woman can have, the despair of the really poor in America (did we need to make hillbilly cartoons out of her family?). And the courage it takes to change a life of unending shame and disconnection and into a connected and victorious life. Though I’m not happy that the Morgan Freeman character posed this question, it was a worthy one: what will we see when we look back over our lives when our time comes? Will we look back and say, well done, we did our best with our lives. Our will we shrug our shoulders complacently and complain that we never got our shot? When the movie connects with these themes, it finds genuine and moving moments for its story and its characters. But it doesn’t find them often enough, and its lack of conviction in its own material undermines the real emotional connections its trying to make.
Mr. Sheldrake
