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Million Dollar Baby (2004)

Submitted by Staff on Sat, 2005-03-12 12:00.


A classic knockout

Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Very Happy Very Happy Very Happy Very Happy Very Happy
Producer: Clint Eastwood, Director: Clint Eastwood
Warner Brothers

Reviewed by Popcorn and the Kernels - 3/12/05

Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) runs an old gym for aspiring fighters in a rundown part of LA, employing his best friend Eddie Dupris (Morgan Freeman) as an all-round helper, janitor, and live-in night watchman.  Frankie used to manage Eddie long ago, and he failed to prevent Eddie from going an extra round during which Eddie lost an eye.

On the personal front, Frankie has no family except a daughter who holds him responsible for some imagined wrongdoing.  She sends the many letters he writes to her back "return to sender."  So both Frankie and Eddie (nicknamed Scrap) are aging together like an old couple who haven't lost the love because they haven't lost the humor and underlying kindness that goes with it.

Scrap handles the young would-be boxers and makes room for charity cases, in particular a dimwitted orphan who pretends to want to fight in return for a place to call home.  Frankie owns the gym and lets Scrap handle most of the training, preferring to read Yeats, learn Gaelic, and attend mass daily, where he enjoys continually bothering the irritable priest with knotty theological questions.

Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), a waitress having left her trailer trash kin in Missouri, shows up at the gym one day eager to become a fighter.  Constantly calling Frankie, "Boss," she keeps hanging around the punching bag and imploring him to teach her to fight.  She's discovered he's the best trainer in LA, and the only one she'll trust.  He resists, saying he doesn't train girls and she's too old at 31, anyway.

Scrap takes a liking to Maggie.  Her enthusiasm and discipline, along with Scrap's quiet counterpunching to the heartstrings of his friend, wear down Frankie's resistance.  Frankie slowly becomes her manager, recognizing he may finally have encountered a recruit with genuine talent.  She starts winning fights, leading to a match for a million dollar prize against a nasty German woman for the champion's belt.

In the moving to the top, Maggie, Frankie, and Scrap experience quiet, exquisite gestures of love for one another.  These precious, unhurried moments are truly the soul of the movie.  For instance, Frankie takes Maggie home to visit her mother and sister, for whom she has bought a home.  They reject Maggie saying the gift might ruin getting their welfare checks.  In the car later she says on the edge of tears, "Frankie, you're the only family I got."

They stop at this rural diner Maggie knows of, where the owner makes lemon pie with real lemon filling, something Frankie relishes.  Literally dozens of such scenes make this movie unforgettable.  It's clear Maggie is Frankie's only family, too, the daughter who left him.  He becomes more and more cautious with her fighting, not wanting her to be hurt.  In the fight with the German girl, Maggie is badly injured.

The movie consists of two parts, equally poignant.  You walk out of the theater feeling a mixture of elation and tears, realizing you've been forever touched by the better angels of our nature.  All three characters, but especially Maggie, should inspire us to be the best we can be.  Truly a wondrous experience.

Popcorn

from the Popcorn Gallery

Intergalactic Hyperchick-Kernels Starlight, Sunshine, and Moonbeam

 Commentary: Starlight 

I was excited.  I knew nothing about Million Dollar Baby except it was Eastwood's film about boxing.  It was going to be good.  I mean, it's Eastwood! But halfway through, he blindsided me with a gut-wrenching plot twist so stunning I scarcely breathed the last hour.  I found myself staring at a blank screen long after the last credit rolled away.

I love this film.  It has everything: excellent screenwriting, great one-liners, interesting 'fringe' characters, soulful music. But what really makes MDB great is Eastwood's talent for casting.  He keeps getting better at this.  Starting with Unforgiven, on through Mystic River, he knocks them out of the ballpark with his uncanny casting alchemy.  In MDB he chose actors he instinctively KNEW would deliver just the right amount of 'edge' to the screen characters.  I want to adopt all of them.

First there's Frankie, the aging boxing manager who reads Gaelic poetry and tries to hide the hole in his life left by a daughter who keeps returning unopened his letters.  Despite all his experience and expertise, I wanted to protect Frankie--if only from going home to find yet one more returned letter. (Aside: I had a gut feeling watching this movie that Clint-the-director may be offering this movie as some kind of mea culpa to one of his own [older] daughters for having been such a distant absentee-father when they were young.  I felt Clint might be asking the audience: Is poetic justice now turning the tables on him?)

Then there's crusty Eddie, Frankie's long-time resident-gym manager, who is privy to the demons Frankie grapples with. Toward the end of the movie, in a few eloquently delivered lines---one of the best movie speeches ever -- he mercifully offers Frankie a rationale for the way things turned out.  He meant this to comfort his friend but my guess is that a helluva lot of theatregoers grabbed out for the same lifeline.  There's something about the timing of that velvety, mellifluous, undulating southern Morgan-Freeman voice that commands attention--and forgiveness.

And finally there's Maggie...nobody's baby, at least at first.  She's a plain, simple thirtysomething waif who wants to learn boxing...from the best.... that's Frankie, in her eyes.  And she will not be deterred by his soul-crushing NOs! And she ultimately prevails.  Maggie is admirably persistent, determined, industrious and loyal.

Loyalty is a strong current running through Million Dollar Baby.  So is kindness.  For me, these two themes are the key to what this movie is all about.


 Commentary: Sunshine 

The Iron Fist under the Velvet Glove....

Million Dollar Baby delivers the proverbial " iron fist under the velvet glove".  It's a gut-puncher.

But lest I risk spilling the beans, I'll focus more on its direction than its storyline.

In this film, Clint Eastwood humanizes three characters in the hard-bitten world of boxing.  Feisty naive Maggie, a waitress whose dogged determination to make it big in boxing, eventually wears down two tough old pros who finally help her realize her dream.

Along the way, we glimpse other players in this world, as well as bits of the main characters' private lives. Eastwood's dry humor is sprinkled throughout, endearingly corny and occasionally even laugh-out-loud funny. The movie then veers into an intense plot twist.

This film easily passed my stringent Litmus Test --it made me CARE about its characters. They're genuine and unpretentious and big-hearted.... I love Clint Eastwood's ability to portray character through sheer understatement.  He's got a reputation for doing a lot of off-camera homework and advance thinking, visualizing and integrating all the disparate elements in his head.  By the time he transfers his mental work to film, its uncluttered and boiled down to crystal-clear essence.

With Eastwood, less is always more.  He achieves his drama through cinematography more than through dialogue. His work is tight and purposeful; he rarely wastes words or celluloid.  What's omitted is as important as what's there...  Each frame is a book, and each word is a picture (Best Picture, as it later turned out.  Best Director too.)

But what I most admire about Eastwood's films is his low-key approach to moral conflicts. He respects his viewers enough to avoid pandering or feeding us silver bullets.  In each successive film, he gets more personal and vulnerable, without sappiness or whining or cynicism.  He presents the issues and involves us in sorting them all out.  In doing so, we become players instead of mere spectators.  Now THAT is what great filmmaking is all about.

Million Dollar Baby is Eastwood's best yet. Don't miss it.

Addendum: Starlight

Oh, I forgot to mention:  Sitting through the credits is a MUST -- there's a lot of interesting information there.... seems like the entire Eastwood clan played some kind of role here...


 Commentary: Moonbeam 

A newspaper snippet I read immediately AFTER I saw Million Dollar Baby gave it a '10,' but called it a "flawed" movie.  Hmmm.  Since I had been absolutely enraptured by not only the movie's plot, but also by the individual performances (ALL the performances, including the Bad Guys), I wondered what the reviewer considered the flaw.  As a loyal Clint Eastwood fan since his Rowdy Yates days on Wagon Train [Rawhide?  —Ed.] , I can't think of any role he played that didn't have something of me in it… some trait, feeling or redemptive piece of humanity that I strongly identified with.  Even his "macho" characters often displayed a compelling sensitivity.

So, what could be flawed about a movie of ordinary people with extraordinary willpower (Maggie), humility (Frankie), and acceptance (Eddie) going about their daily, fairly- ordinary lives?  I considered the fact that the plot never revealed the cause of Frankie's rift with his daughter. OK, it would have been nice to have that explained, but would not have added anything to the story or the characters… it was important only to know that a rift existed because that made Frankie's increasing paternal attention to Maggie more logical.  No, that couldn't have been the flaw.

——Warning: Plot giveaway follows——

The more I reflected on my own reaction during the movie, however, the more I believe that the "flaw" referred to the same instinctive feeling I had while I was glued to every scene, every word of MDB:  It was too easy!  Yes, it was gut-wrenching, thought-provoking, heart-rending and soul-searching, but ultimately, I would have found no logical reason (and I'm still looking for a moral one) to argue against Frankie's decision.  Eastwood made it too easy.  Consider:

  • Maggie's family was despicable from the first moment we meet any of them, from her mother (that hurt) down to the last member of her extended family.  Not one of them showed a smidgeon of concern for her, let alone tenderness or love. She therefore had NO ONE! 
  • Maggie's circumstances after the tongue-biting episode left her without the one thing that might have given her a reason to live:  the ability to communicate.  She had NOTHING TO GIVE! 

Too easy!

Despite this, Million Dollar Baby will be one of the movies I will watch again and again.  Its human beauty and depth cannot be appreciated with just one viewing.

Flawed movie?  Maybe.  But then, LIFE is flawed.

the Kernels Chit Chat

 From: Starlight 

As an aside, but something I initially viscerally felt throughout the movie: was Clint-the-director offering this movie as some kind of mea culpa to one of his own older daughters? (Of course, then I'd want to know: for what? and Perhaps his relationships with Sandra Locke and his subsequent consort(s) estranged one of his older daughters...that kept going through my mind, but is not central to the movie or theme at all, probably falls more under 'gossip' than anything else...


 From: Moonbeam 

Hmmm, that's an interesting  -- and probably accurate -- thought.  What do you know about his personal life besides the Sandra Locke episode?  How many kids?


 From: Starlight 

Moving from current times backward: he has an 8-year old daughter with his current Hispanic wife.  Then there's the previous 'significant woman' with whom he had (and continues to have) a good relationship who was in many of his movies (OUTLAW JOSEY WALES, UNFORGIVEN) throughout the last 25 years -- I don't know her name offhand -- she had his out-of-wedlock daughter, who is now probably in her late teens.

Prior to that was Sondra Locke (the very intense 'heat' between them ultimately turned very intensely ugly) with whom he had no children).  So, in addition to the children he had with his wife -- I think there were two or three daughters, who would probably be in their 30s or 40s by now -- I'm not sure if there were any other out-of-wedlock daughters... Clint doesn't have any sons, just daughters....Pop, can you correct any of this where needed and fill in the 'tween time-blanks with respect to the women in Clint's life?


 From: Sunshine 

I do know from a recent A&E biography on Clint that he is very family-conscious, and his various families are VERY connected to each other, all the step children, step-wives and step-mistresses, etc. are quite close and get together often for family things.  He has routinely has put all of his daughters in key or cameo roles in his films throughout.


 From: Popcorn 

I heard he had a ton of kids with about seven women, scattered all over creation.  He has at least one son, Kyle.


 From: Starlight 

Duh! Yes, of COURSE he had a son, because Kyle's name is in MDB's credits (under songmixer of whatever).... these credits were wonderful to watch by the way for this very reason that they gave me extra information about the movie and Clint's family's involvement in it, i.e., that his daughter played the little girl with dog at the gas station, and yes, that the music in the movie (some of it) was Clint's own score.......whadda guy!)


 From: Sunshine 

Kyle and Allison are his oldest kids from 1st marriage I think

Not sure if it was Alison but one of Clint's (older) daughters was a Golden Globe presenter just a few weeks ago, pretty...

She presented him with his MDB Golden Globe award; the commentators kept mentioning her and him in context with the MDB storyline, cameras panning both of them regularly, Clint's eyes continually followed her [but since I hadn't seen the movie yet wasn't really paying too much attention to what was being said and why....]


 From: Moonbeam 

Boy, now don't you wish you could turn back the clock and pay attention to some of the details we missed.  I didn't see the Golden Globes at all this year --- and usually I like to watch those even better than the AA.

Will definitely have to see the movie again.


     
  • There was an interesting interview of Morgan Freeman by Charlie Rose, the nightly PBS program, on 1/26/05.  I caught it as a rerun on 3/9/05, so possibly if you dig through the PBS website's programming guide you might find it on again.  —Ed.
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