Million Dollar Baby (2004)

2/5 stars

Mr. Scrap (Morgan Freeman) opens the brutal and bloody Million Dollar Baby (2004) by describing the connection between a trainer and his fighter, how everything in boxing is backwards, and the strength and heart it takes to savagely beat another human being senseless. This movie is a plethora of contradictions, the major one being the statement that Hilary Swanks’s character is a fighter boxing aside – Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) tells her mama on an unpleasant and, the audience senses, typical visit, “I’m a fighter, mama”– a statement tragically unsupported by her actions and attitude toward the end of the movie.

The main characters, Frankie (Clint Eastwood) and his lady boxer Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank), who he was at first unwilling to train because she’s a girl and too old at 31to break into the sport, are on a journey towards fulfilling Maggie’s dream of becoming a professional boxer. Maggie is from the epitome of a white trash family. She grew up in southwestern Missouri in the tiny town of Theodosia, where her 312 pound mother still resides along with her sister who cheats on her welfare by pretending one of her babies is still alive, where her daddy died, and where her brother will return once he gets out of prison.

Frankie owns a boxing gym and trains fighters. He has a questioning, if not angry, relationship with God. He goes to Mass everyday and receives every letter he sends to his estranged daughter back in his mailbox labeled “return to sender.” Maggie walks into Frankie’s gym just after his latest protégée has left him for a manager who will get him a title fight, and though he at first refuses, he begrudgingly starts training her with the gentle prodding of Mr. Scrap, who recognizes a little bit of himself in Maggie.

Predictably, Maggie turns into Cinderella, the underdog who knocks out fighters in the first round and makes it all the way to a championship fight with Billie the Blue Bear (Lucia Rijker), a former prostitute and the East German champion. Blue Bear is a reputed dirty fighter in the ring, and in the pitch of the fight, with a single cheap shot, takes away Maggie’s dreams and ability to box. The rest of the movie is a deteriorating of Maggie’s and Frankie’s lives.

It is in this last third of the film that everything that is built up in the beginning is completely torn down. Mr. Scrap says that “boxing is fighting beyond endurance” and in boxing “instead of running from the pain, like a sane person would do, you step into it.” Maggie thinks that because she can no longer pursue her passion, life is no longer worth living, even though she is still alive and in control of herself. She draws a parallel between her situation and her daddy’s dog. Axel, a German shepherd, loses the use of his hind legs and even though Maggie’s daddy is so sick he can hardly stand, he takes the dog out into the woods, the two of them singing and howling, then presumably shoots him, and comes home alone. Even though Frankie tries to convince her to go back to school and tries to find another path for her, she refuses and puts a burden on him that destroys what emotional sanity he had left.

Besides having the two halves not quite coming together, the film is filled with every worn out stereotype a sports movie could offer, from the underdog who’s a natural talent, to the compassionate, quiet friend who seems to have deeper insight into the lives of others than anyone in real life. Freeman’s Mr. Scrap is a transplanted Red from in The Shawshank Redemption, but when one has played God and the president of the United States, one already has all the credibility one needs. Working with seemingly worn out genres – the Western his most notable, and the other recent film Mystic River that takes on the murder mystery – is no great feat for Eastwood. Million Dollar Baby, like the others, is filled with great acting, cinematography, and directing. If only this film didn’t have the plot holes, then maybe it could live up to the hype of it being Eastwood’s masterpiece.

Eastwood successfully builds up the notion in the audience’s mind that Maggie has truly lost everything and that Frankie is being selfish by not doing what she asks of him. There is a fall out with the family, not a great loss, and Frankie, her father figure, is the only thing she has left. Frankie, an apparent Catholic, though an unhappy one, does not let his spiritual life or the advice of his priest get in the way of his definition of compassion. The resolution is disappointing in its betrayal of the heroine’s much talked about strength, though the decision is understandable.
Mr. Scrap draws the parallel that people who watch car accidents wanting to see bodies are the same people who claim to love boxing. It must be the same with boxing movies, especially the female version. It shouldn’t be pleasant to watch people destroy each other. Million Dollar Baby is hopeless in its message and its characters’ actions. Mr. Scrap says, “Everything in boxing is backwards”; yeah, so is everything in this movie.