Million Dollar Baby


by Shari L. Rosenblum

There is a little bit of poetry to the hodgepodge of clichés that is Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood's tale of an over-the-hill trainer who takes on a girl fighter against his better instincts, but nearly all of it feels lifted from Frank Darabont's The Shawshank Redemption. Narrated, as that film was, by a eulogizing Morgan Freeman (there nicknamed “Red,” here nicknamed “Scrap”), Million Dollar Baby seems to tread the same pathways of faith and redemption, the cycle of life, and the meaning of hope as that prison saint's tale—through a reworking of film standards from Rocky to Old Yeller. It is a temptingly emotive package, but even for the audience of willing spirit, the film is unbearably weak.

Written by Paul Haggis, from stories by F.X. Toole, Million Dollar Baby tells the story of a washed-up boxing trainer, his long-time friend, and the over-the-hill enthusiast from the wrong side of the tracks (the proverbial 5-and-10 cent store) who comes to the broken down gym to fight her way out of the hand fate has dealt her. It is the kind of film that pounds the audience with fake brutality (bloody eyes, broken noses, Jake LaMotta's playground) and impresses those who would be impressed with its phony moral quandaries (when do you stop the fight?). A trinitarian hagiography directed with Eastwood's special gift for tedium, it makes of its protagonists three godly souls wrapped up in meaningfulness: Frankie Dunn (Eastwood), the trainer who can fix just about any cut—except those that most need fixing; Scrap (Freeman), the one-eyed ex-boxer who sees more clearly than anyone; and Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) the trailer trash girlboxer who doesn't cry.

Cast in flickering lights, the characters are more than half shaded at least half of the time, coming in and out of darkness; the film abounds in sparring silhouettes. It is as if Mr. Eastwood took the idea of shadow boxing just a bit too literally—the imaginary sparring partner the unwitting audience member hoping for more. What starts out evocative quickly becomes tiresome (good grief, another shadow, one thinks to oneself . . . could this be yet another metaphor? Something else hidden? Something to look for underneath?). Light comes from within—or so we are to imagine. The church imagery (replete with a half dozen prayer scenes and conversations with a priest) hangs heavily. If not quite father, son and holy spirit, Frankie, Scrap and Maggie each stand out loud and obviously for different aspects of faith: forgiveness, mercy, grace. As one set of predictable circumstances is followed by another, each sets a stage for the gifts of faith—grace, mercy and forgiveness. And Love, capital “L,” hovers always in the corners, dripping thickly over the triteness of the dialogue (tough ain't enough, it seems) and the turns of events (it is worth noting, though, that for all its churchy fixings, the film lacks a good deal of Christian charity—the underclasses who people the world around the holy three are dastardly and devious: disloyal, dishonorable, grasping, and greedy...a million dollars worth of demons).

The acting in the film is as predictable as the various denouements. Eastwood plays the tough-skinned codger with the soft-spot heart that he's played in every film he's made since his waistline moved mid-ribcage. Freeman reprises the wisdom of the sages role he's been in from Shawshank through Bruce Almighty. And Swank gazes, smiles and jumps around with the sort of obtrusive actorly conviction that is sure to get a nod at Oscar time, more earnest than persuasive.

Superior to last year's Mystic River in that the characters actually make sense on some level, and there are no last minute Shakespearean set changes, Million Dollar Baby follows nonetheless in that film's tradition and in that of its predecessors in faux profundity. It would win my vote for the 2004 In the Bedroom award.

Mercy and grace, if not forgiveness, frame The Woodsman, a small film about a subject that cannot be softened by easy film clichés. Cowritten by first-time director Nicole Kassell and Steven Fechter, it gives us a few moments'—weeks'—insight into one convicted child molester's re-entry into society after twelve years away. It makes no excuses for him, offers no apologies, looks for no answers. The film has its contrivances, but its quest is more stark than they suggest: it is an observation. And it is keenly felt.

The title, with its multiple and often unemphasized metaphors, evokes explicitly both the predator and the savior from the cautionary fairy tale of the little girl in the red riding hood. Kevin Bacon, as the protagonist Walter, conveys the realest sense of that imaginary duality: ambivalent in both roles (“I molested little girls,” he confesses, “but I never hurt them. I never hurt them.”). Though tinged with moments of melodrama within, his is a performance highlighted with subtlety and nuance. Understated, but complex. However far in we see, we know the sins go deeper. There is no hint of a cure. What then is rehabilitation? The film asks, but does not answer the question. It's all in Bacon's eyes.

The rest of the cast is small: Walter's boss (David Allan Grier), the receptionist/catalyst with a vengeance toward Walter (Eve), and co-workers at the lumberyard where he is given a job, among whom Vickie, a woman not easily shocked, with a secret of her own (Kyra Sedgwick), his brother-in-law who wants to trust him (Benjamin Bratt), but can't, Sgt. Lucas, a police officer whose beat is pedophilia and who has a watch on him (Mos Def), and a little girl named Robin (Hannah Pilkes). Besides Eve, who is asked to do little of depth, Sedgwick is the least persuasive of the performers, if only because her role makes the least sense: there is no clue what draws her to this man, keeps her on his side. Mos Def is, by contrast, the most intensely believable, even when the screenplay turns to ends too-neatly-tied-up. He manages an air of disdain and suspicion without exaggerated tone or gesture. His eyes and the tilt of his head speak volumes.

But as I sit recalling the film, it is the little girl that lingers in my mind, and the way that she and Walter interact (despite some triteness in the dialogue). As he comes to life in a way we haven't seen before—wolf and woodsman all in one—Robin's tears appeal and distress. The screenplay, daringly, and terrifyingly close to truth, gives her an awareness of the danger, but compounds it, as nature does, with a compassion that the predator can take as complicity ("He gets into the car because he wants to get into the car," Walter writes of a victim earlier on). And we are reminded, hauntingly, despite the film's attempts at a positive outlook, that the cycle may never end. The temptation is always there; and the crime is always just a temptation away.

It is a sobering and unrelenting truth.

©2004 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene