Million Dollar Baby has just won Oscars for best picture, for its female lead, Hilary Swank; for supporting actor (Morgan Freeman) and, of course, for its director, Clint Eastwood. At first, it looks like it’s going to be simply a capably managed feel-good boxing movie. But towards the very end there is … not a twist, but a narrative development that makes it a lot deeper, darker and indeed more real than you had any right to expect. The only question is: does Eastwood land this mighty punch too late for it to make a genuine difference overall to the film’s identity?
Eastwood plays Frankie, a wizened old fight trainer who runs a regulation beat-up gym in a dreary part of Los Angeles. (I say he’s wizened and old; he looks very good for 74. And few directors are still working, let alone at this level of achievement, at that age.) Frankie’s assistant in the gym is former fighter Scrap (Freeman), who narrates the movie, as Freeman did The Shawshank Redemption, and with whom Frankie has a droll line in backchat.
But Frankie is not all tough. He goes to mass and argues with the priest about Catholic doctrine; he reads poetry in his spare time. There is sadness in Frankie’s life: he is estranged from his grown-up daughter, a piece of intelligence that filters through as Maggie (Swank) arrives, begging Frankie to train her. The sexist old grump at first refuses this ”girlie” and then, well, you know the rest. Or rather: you actually don’t know the rest. It’s more unexpected than you think.
At any rate, when another gym steals one of Frankie’s boxers he submits to Maggie’s request and begins to train her. Of course, he is looking for a substitute daughter, and scenes in which she learns to use the punchbag are an unusual way to tell that part of the story. And her successes are also failures, raising questions that Eastwood is not afraid to deal with: this kind of prize-fighting is not exactly glamorous or heroic, for instance, and some of Frankie’s religious beliefs are going to get thoroughly interrogated as well.
Shot in the sombre, dark style for which Eastwood’s pictures are notable, Million Dollar Baby has a measured pace that must surely derive from Eastwood’s maturity as a man and a filmmaker. The movie gets under your guard in the final rounds with some emotional jabs and a sharp anti-clerical uppercut. It is not perhaps the kind of thing that you could have seen flamboyantly grabbing the best-movie Oscar, but it is a heartfelt, creditable picture. — Â