Million Dollar Baby (2004)

Since making his film debut a half century ago in Revenge of the Creature, Clint Eastwood has blown away hundreds of bad guys in dozens of westerns and cop movies, romanced Meryl Streep, and was best friends with an orangutan, none of which is likely to prepare you for Million Dollar Baby, his 25th film as a director. Superficially a boxing drama, it has earned seven Oscar nominations, including one for best picture. It’s also generating controversy.

Million Dollar Baby touches on a sensitive social issue, but it’s no more about that than it is about boxing. It’s a small scale, slice of life drama that veers unexpectedly into tragedy, as life itself sometimes does.

Eastwood is Frankie Dunn, a boxing coach and former cut man (the guy who patches up fighters when they step out of the ring) who runs a gym tended by his best friend, Scrap (Morgan Freeman), a former fighter who lost an eye when Frankie failed to stop a fight in time. Frankie feels guilty about that, but then he feels guilty about a lot of things. As his parish priest tells him, "Any man who attends Mass every day can’t forgive himself for something." He certainly doesn’t find forgiveness from his estranged daughter. His letters to her are consistently returned unopened.

When Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), a waitress, turns up in his gym, determined to be a champion under Frankie’s tutelage, he’s not interested. But Maggie refuses to be discouraged. For her, boxing is the only ticket out of a life of poverty and defeat. She is self-described "trailer trash" from the Ozarks with a family of selfish rubes who care more about the money she earns than about her. Frankie reluctantly takes her on, and, sure enough, she has the stuff of which champion fighters are made, and proves it in a series of fights from which she emerges triumphant.

If this sounds like the plot of dozens of boxing films, you’re right, but what makes Million Dollar Baby better than the rest is the execution. Every scene, every line of dialogue in Paul Haggis’s screenplay (based on stories by F.X. Toole) serves a purpose, and Eastwood directs in the tight, lean manner for which he has been justly praised. Despite a running time of 132 minutes, nothing seems superfluous. With the aid of cinematographer Tom Stern, Eastwood also gives the film a noirish look that often makes you feel you’re watching a black-and-white movie. Best of all are the characters. These are people you care about, who’ve been knocked to the canvas by life but manage to keep on swinging.

Eastwood plays a variation on a role he’s played before, that of the gruff, wizened mentor, but as someone once said about art, it’s not how wide you go that counts, but how deep. Here, the 74 year-old icon goes deeper than he has in the past, and gives what is arguably his finest screen performance to date. Whether engaging in one of the several contentious conversations he has with his priest ("Have you got a minute to spare about the Immaculate Conception?"), swapping barbs with Scrap about the holes in the latter’s socks, or watching over Maggie as though she’s the daughter whose affection he craves, he’s a long way from the taciturn detective of Dirty Harry. (Eastwood also composed the film's spare, effectively melancholy score.) As always, Morgan Freeman never seems to be acting. He inhabits each scene naturally and effortlessly, as though he is the man he’s playing. As he did in The Shawshank Redemption, Freeman narrates, offering insights into the characters that they would be loathe to divulge themselves.

But the picture belongs to Swank. Feisty yet always feminine, she glows as Maggie, a determined woman who gives her all in the ring, but is compassionate enough to express concern about her injured opponent. The character has body and soul, as well as heart, and Swank embodies all three brilliantly.

Be warned, however, that this is no upbeat female take on Rocky. The picture takes a dramatic, unexpected detour in the final act that some conservative American media propagandists are condemning. By taking dialogue out of context, particularly Scrap’s final voice overs, they have accused the film of taking a controversial stance in a hotly debated social issue. One may not agree with the decisions the characters make, but it’s entirely believable that these characters would choose the paths they do. This is drama, after all, and Million Dollar Baby is a superb drama likely to keep playing in your mind’s eye long after the projection lamp goes dark.

Brian W. Fairbanks

Originally published at Paris Woman Journal

© 2004 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven

In Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, the winner of four 1992 Academy Awards, including best picture and best director, people die just as they have in dozens upon dozens of westerns but with one difference: whereas even the most minor characters killed off in westerns of the past were permitted to die with some dignity, in Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood, directing from an original screenplay by David Webb Peoples, is not concerned with appearances. People die wherever their killer finds them.

In one scene, a man is plugged full of bullets in an outhouse. He spews blood while defecating, his arteries emptying along with his bowels. John Ford, and even Sam Peckinpah, would have let their characters make more graceful exits, at least letting them pull up their pants, but Eastwood makes no concessions to decorum. If the scene was choreographed, it was only to insure that it did not appear rehearsed. One does not watch the scene and express admiration for the "cool" or dramatic way in which the victim stumbles to the ground. In Unforgiven, being killed is an ugly, painful humiliation, almost as much for the killer as it is for the victim.

The plot of Unforgiven is a simple one: a prostitute’s face is slashed by a cowboy who takes offense at the woman’s having laughed at his "small pecker." When the sheriff (Gene Hackman) refuses to punish the crime in a manner that the women consider appropriate (he merely demands that the cowboy repay the saloon owner for the loss of income that will result from the slashed hooker’s diminished appeal to customers), they band together to offer a reward to anyone who will administer a more violent and permanent punishment.

Soon, a young arrogant figure calling himself the "Schofield Kid" (Jaimz Woolvetz) rides onto the Kansas farm of William Munny (Eastwood), a once sadistic killer now reformed through the love of a wife whose grave Munny is seen digging during the opening credits. "I’m not like that no more," Munny tells the Kid, but with two small children and a failing farm to support, Munny eventually accepts the Kid’s offer to join him in pursuit of the "whore’s gold," but only after enticing his former partner, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), to share the journey into Big Whiskey, Wyoming, and, of course, sharing the reward.

As they make their way to the town where Sheriff Little Bill Daggett rules in an especially brutal manner when not building a house, on the porch of which he dreams of "drinking my coffee and watching the sunset," Munny and Logan remember their wild and unconscionably violent days which they now regret and believe are safely behind them. Munny is not convinced, however, and continually expresses shame and horror at his past cruelties. He is a haunted man, not at all eager to feed the Kid’s hunger for details about the art of killing.

W.W. Beuchchamp (Saul Rubinek), a writer, "of books," as he repeatedly tells those who ask, is as eager as the Kid to hear of the exploits of such merchants of death as Munny, as well as English Bob (Richard Harris), a cold-blooded killer whose romanticized biography Beuchchamp is writing. The elegant Bob arrives in Big Whiskey with Beuchchamp in tow, eager to collect the bounty, but instead of living up to the title that Beuchchamp has given him, "The Duke of Death," Bob gets a severe dressing down from Daggett who exposes the fraud behind English Bob’s legend, in addition to beating the fanciful gunfighter senseless. As Bob lies defeated in Daggett’s jail cell, the cruel yet affable sheriff debunks the myths of the West’s quick-draw and short-tempered killers, including one of Bob’s victims, a man called "two-gun," not, as Beuchchamp believes, because he carried two pistols, but because he had an especially large penis which he once placed in the wrong woman’s holster, leading to his demise at the hands of the jealous Englishman.

With Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood casts a cold objective eye on the realities of the West after the gunsmoke from decades worth of Hollywood westerns has cleared. There are no heroes in Eastwood’s vision, only men and women whose flawed spirits take their toll on the flesh, their own and others. There’s good and bad evident in the best and the worst of the people in Big Whiskey, but it’s the ugly - the ugliness of vanity, revenge, money and death - that Unforgiven emphasizes.

The performances are impeccable. As Munny, Eastwood, often dismissed as a "star" who gets by on his charismatic presence in lieu of acting, offers the finest performance of his long career. Twenty-eight years after A Fistful of Dollars launched him on the road to superstardom, Eastwood’s William Munny could be the laconic and mercenary Man With No Name, now aged and mellow, and mournfully looking back, finally feeling the pain his recklessness had caused others. Gene Hackman’s Oscar winning Little Bill is a man who exploits his sheriff’s badge to maintain an egotistical control over the town, rather than to keep the peace. Morgan Freeman provides the compassionate balance that keeps Munny from drowning in his self-pitying nightmares, and, as the Schoefield Kid, Jaimz Woolveet embodies the youthfully ignorant bravado that Munny and Logan dropped before the Kid was born.

There is also Richard Harris whose marvelous portrait of English Bob compensates for the shameless mugging he has engaged in through a string of unworthy, career killing projects in the two decades preceding this deserved comeback. The rest of the cast, including Frances Fisher as Strawberry Alice, the hooker who proposes that the women seek revenge, and Anna Thompson, the "cut whore," are also excellent.

And then there’s long, lean Anthony James as Skinny, the saloon keeper. Twenty five years earlier, James made his film debut as Ralph, the man behind the counter of the diner where Warren Oates liked to sip Coke and eat pie in another Oscar winner for best picture, In the Heat of the Night. James is one of the great unheralded character actors of our time, and his presence is always welcome.

The cinematography by Jack Green, editing by Oscar winner Joel Cox, sets by Harry Bumstead, and music score by Lennie Niehous (centered on "Claudia’s Theme" written by Eastwood) are all first-rate. The personnel behind the scenes are all regulars in Eastwood’s Malpaso company, and it is interesting to note that Eastwood is the only major director--in fact, the only director currently working--to shun the possessive credit ("A film by...") that was once reserved for the absolute giants of the craft--Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks--but is now claimed by every traffic cop who steps behind a camera. Eastwood recognizes the art of filmmaking as a collaborative effort, one which a director leads but surely cannot do alone. Perhaps Eastwood’s generosity is what makes his team continually strive to deliver their absolute best. With Unforgiven, they have.

Brian W. Fairbanks

© 1999 Brian W. Fairbanks


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