There's a moment, near the beginning of "Million Dollar Baby", that lets you know, if you hadn't figured it out already, that this isn't your run-of-the-mill boxing movie. Maggie Fitzgerald (Hillary Swank), the waitress-cum-boxer who practically begs trainer and gym owner Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) to teach her between the ropes, finally finds out that someone's going to let her get in the ring and show her stuff. Only it's not the someone she was hoping it would be. Instead of the thrill of the chance, she reacts to the pain of being left alone. Again. If you hadn't figured it out already, "Million Dollar Baby" is not going to end with Maggie, triumphant in the centre of the ring, being held up by a beaming Clint Eastwood. It's only a boxing movie, in that way, tangentially.
It's something more, in fact. It's a story about characters, men and women trying their best to bob and weave through life, looking for that opening through which they can throw their best haymaker. And trying their best to protect themselves in the process. Though even the best defense can't block out every bit of pain.
Eastwood confidently takes a seat in the director's chair, as is his wont by now. Though he's been hit or miss in his career (watch "Unforgiven" and "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" back-to-back to see just how inconsistent he can be), "Million Dollar Baby" is the kind of film that's right there in his wheelhouse: it concerns big themes filtered through small but archetypal characters, human beings that feel life and live life and demand that life give them something back. Though they know it never really will.
Not known as a visual stylist, necessarily, Eastwood does his best work here, giving the film a look that gets layered underneath these themes, propping them up in sly and understated ways. Much of the film finds its characters standing half in the dark shadows, half in the stark light, until the contrast is broken with a step forward or a step backward. He, and cinematographer Tom Stern, give the film the same look they gave their last joint outing, "Mystic River". Everything has that same crisp, New England-in-autumn look; dull olives and denims and greys dominate the palette.
He also does well handling the film's slow pacing; there's a boxing procedural montage, early on, that's slow and quiet in a most satisfying way. We get to watch, ritualistically, as someone is broken down to her barest elements, and then built back up into something that gleams. Then there are the mandatory boxing scenes, which don’t feel like any other boxing scenes I remember seeing. Mainly because most boxing scenes don't make you feel; "Million Dollar Baby" remembers to give every punch an accompanying sound effect, so that bones crackle with every landed jab. It's no surprise, then, when a broken nose -- a harrowing moment -- becomes a viscerally intense breakthrough. We've seen such things before, in cinema. But not like this.
Eastwood the actor broke into the movies some forty years ago, playing men who held their cards close to their chest (so close that those early movies begged off giving his characters proper names). He uses that experience to show us only enough of Dunn as we need. Turns out we don't need too much, to empathize with his pains and his sorrows. We do get some details, though their exhibition is handled with subtlety and clarity, and are never telegraphed or lingered over. Frankie reads Yeats, and is teaching himself Gaelic, not because to do so gives his character interesting quirks. Rather, both facts serve the plot. The same could be said of some early-film scenes where Eastwood winds up a young priest with his smart mouth. Someone who only sees half the movie would look at these scenes and see them as merely comic relief. Someone who stuck around to the denouement would know just how important they were, to set up the character and his inner conflicts.
Morgan Freeman plays Eddie "Scrap-Iron" Dupris, Dunn's oldest friend and most loyal of employees. The actor could dominate a frame with just a twitch in his slumped over posture. He does more than that -- in case you were worried -- like trading caustic but friendly barbs with Eastwood, and handling the chore of presenting the film's voice-over narration. "Sometimes the best way to deliver a punch is to step back," philosophizes Dupris, neatly setting up some of the film's more cogent themes. Though even though that would appear to be enough, he comes back later for an addendum: "Step back too far, and you ain't fighting at all." Freeman allows Dupris, a broken-down boxer himself, living and working in the gym, to have the intellect and the level of gravitas the character needs to survive.
It's a given that Freeman and Eastwood would be good (well, it's a given that Freeman would be good; it's a given that Eastwood would deliver the same gravelly effective performance that has become his trademark since his sixties passed him by). And it should be a given that Hillary Swank is also good; the woman has an Oscar, in case you forgot. The surprising thing here is just how surprised you'll be to find out how good she can be.
"She grew up knowing one thing: she was trash," is how her character is introduced. That's permission to affect a southern accent, not worry about your greasy hair, and worry even less about projecting brains. Maggie is all that, sure. But she's also worked harder than hell to pull herself up from nothing, to go after her dream. "This is the only thing I ever felt good doing," she says, about her boxing. It's a maudlin line, one you'd only find a character in a movie spouting. But coming out of Swank's mouth, it works; she gives it innocence and determination in equal supply.
She calls Dunn "Boss", like she'd been hanging out with Cool Hand Luke on the chain gang. It's an apt comparison, for, like Newman's Luke, Swank is a slight figure who's a pro at taking a beating. This seems to be the best path towards success for the actress. She specializes in slipping into skins usually reserved for men ("Boys Don't Cry"), in roles that require her to be bloodied and bruised, and willing to take more and more pain. A "girl" boxer would seem a perfect fit; and it is. Though I was more impressed with what she had to do in the film's third. To say any more would be spoiling. And it's a storyline that deserves its purity.
The best part of watching the three leads, though, is the story that's told through their eyes. Eastwood's steely Dirty Harry-glare is present, as usual. But it's far from menacing. Instead it shows his world-weariness, the experience that life has handed him (though it put up a helluva fight before ever giving up). Freeman's hangdog, seen-it-all gaze is made even more precious by his one fake eye, lost in a fight long ago, that holds as much depth as the ocean it chromatically resembles. Swank's eyes are bright in the beginning, so shiny they look like klieg lights, searching around for something to see, something to illuminate. Or even just someone to ignite them again tomorrow. Eventually, that light fades. But doesn't it fade for everyone? If I were going for the joke, here, I would say that "Million Dollar Baby" has the eye of the tiger. It does, but not in a "Rocky"-was-also-a-boxing-movie sense. Instead, it looks you right in yours, before it rips and claws and mauls its way to your heart.
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