Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Anora. Million Dollar Baby is the seventy-eighth film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here.
Former cut man Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) has seen the very worst of what boxing can do to a fighter. Perhaps that is the reason he’s been so cautious putting the ones he now trains into high leverage bouts. Cautious is the polar opposite of how anyone might describe aspiring boxer Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank.) She’s too old and Frankie wont train her but she’s also too ambitious to let any of that stop her. Through sheer persistence she gets Dunn to take a chance on her and begins to knock out any woman unlucky enough to enter the ring against her. Million Dollar Baby is another brilliant Eastwood takedown of machismo and his own glorified image, until it becomes something else entirely. Much like he deconstructed the western with Unforgiven, the director twists around the boxing template. Boxing has long been a favorite tool for stories about scrappy underdogs, glamorizing the, almost exclusively, men who trade blows on the canvas. This is a film that seems to welcome a woman into that club, at least until it takes a turn. When Maggie reaches the mountaintop, dominating a title fight against an established opponent, she doesn’t get to revel in it. A cheap shot sends her neck into a stool and she becomes paralyzed. A genuinely jarring turn of events, mostly because it is a side of sport we so rarely see on screen. Plenty of boxing films explore the difficult rise, even a fall from grace but very few show the consequence of a violent career quite like this. What the film becomes after Maggie lands in a hospital bed is something much sadder, less propulsive than the half that preceded it. Certainly some of that has to do with the immobilizing Swank. She’s a wonderfully talented actress so even her bedridden scenes work but before that she comes out swinging with all the ferocity her character required. A dynamic, fluid performance with physicality that is dearly missed. When it hits its highs, Million Dollar Baby is fun and subversive. Watching Maggie pummel her competition and Frankie work through his own personal demons is insightful. Eastwood’s film just cannot sustain that energy through an uneven Paul Haggis script (thank goodness we won’t have another one of those anytime soon, *gulp*) that fizzles out. On balance the peak is enough to keep Million Dollar Baby afloat. 8/10
Comments
|