MILLION DOLLAR BABY: AFTER THE AWARDS HOOPLA DIES DOWN

By Joel Johnson

Finally all the awards have been handed out. Million Dollar Baby has provided a lot of extra knickknacks for the homes of Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, and Hilary Swank. The most coveted statuettes were the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Morgan Freeman, the Best Actress Oscar for Hilary Swank, and the Best Director and Best Film Oscars for Clint Eastwood. This was an impressive haul for a film for which Eastwood had trouble finding financial backing. While the Academy has given its imprimatur to Eastwood’s film, the question is whether Million Dollar Baby is as great as all those major Oscars would make one think it is.

What the two Oscars for Freeman and Swank as well as Eastwood’s Best Actor nomination represent is the quality of the acting from the lead trio. They work superbly with each other. They sell the film’s establishing premises. Eastwood is tough old boxing manager Frankie Dunn with a softer core than he might like to admit. Freeman is Scrap, a retired boxer, who helps Frankie run his dingy fight gym. Hilary Swank is Maggie Fitzgerald, a waitress-turned-aspiring-boxer, who has come all the way from the Ozarks to Frankie’s Los Angeles gym for the training that she thinks will turn her into a champion. She arrives at the gym during the stage of life (circa age thirty) when most of her peers are becoming “soccer moms”—not starting out learning to box. Swank’s exotic attractiveness seems to lend itself to undercutting her femininity—it can’t be simply a coincidence that her two Oscar-winning performances were as a woman posing as a man (in Boys Don’t Cry) and as a woman boxer. She is convincing enough as an aspiring boxer that the audience doesn’t get caught up in wondering why has she chosen to become a boxer relatively late in life and why has she singled out Frankie as the one manager who can turn her into a champion. After all, we first meet Frankie being dumped by a boxer anxious for a championship shot that Frankie has repeatedly put off because he feels that the boxer isn’t ready. Scrap’s stern lecture that Frankie has “protected [himself] right out of a championship fight” certainly makes one question if Frankie has a track record for delivering champions. We never receive any other information about Frankie’s success in managing champions. The audience has to accept on face value that Maggie knows something about his managing career that makes her believe he can make her successful, but we never find out what that is.

Early on we discover that Frankie is severely estranged from his only child, a daughter, to whom he writes regularly only to have his letters returned unopened. We never learn the cause for the rupture in their relationship. Scrap eventually tells how he insisted in continuing a fight despite taking a terrible beating from which Frankie wanted to protect him by throwing in the towel. The injuries Scrap received resulted in the loss of sight in one eye. That fight took place twenty-three years ago at about the same time Frankie started attending daily mass, making it seem a likely cause for the guilt that is so bad that, as his priest suggests, he is “not able to forgive himself.” However, this doesn’t seem likely to be the transgression that would have created a gulf between Frankie and his daughter. Despite his initial reluctance to even train Maggie, they eventually establish a strong bond in a surrogate father-daughter relationship, with Scrap acting as Frankie’s brother and Maggie’s uncle. This creation of a surrogate family from these three spare-part people is one of the film’s great joys.

The film also excels at showing the boxing world from its roots in dark and drab gyms. The boxing gym setting is purposefully underlit and designed to look like the film could have been set in nearly any decade from the 1930s to the present. This timeless quality is supported by several other anachronistic touches including rotary phones, antiquated gas pumps, and old-fashioned diners. The only direct time-period reference is to prominent real-life 1980s fighter Tommy “Hitman” Hearns, who the film’s characters state has been retired for many years. Of course, women becoming boxers is a phenomenon that has emerged only in the last twenty years, so the setting is contemporary. The revelation of the interactions in the boxing world shows that the original creator is very familiar with what is behind the fight night glitz in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. The uneasy relationships between boxers and managers as well as between rival managers is revealed with verisimilitude by boxing insider F. X. Toole and well captured in the adaptation of his stories into a screenplay by Paul Haggis. The only exception is that the self-proclaimed would-be fighter Danger (Jay Baruchel) seems so hopelessly ill suited to boxing that the name cannot refer to what he is but must refer to what he would be in should he try to step in the ring against any other fighter. This is a character that likely was much more interesting on the page but is virtually impossible to bring to life as a real human being.

There is indeed a pattern for the film’s characters beyond the lead trio to be just two-dimensional. They service the plot by appearing as handy stereotypes. There’s a mean bully of a boxer looking for an easy mark—Danger—to pummel. There are venal rival trainers. Maggie’s family is all “trailer trash,” and her mother Earline (Margo Martindale) is a scheming “welfare queen.” The champion Billie “The Blue Bear” (Lucia Rijker) that Maggie eventually fights is a vicious competitor who has never heard of the Marques of Queensbury rules that define fair play in boxing.

The film begins a trajectory similar to the glorious rags-to-riches story of the original and best Rocky. Maggie starts facing other women boxers and, after a couple of initial struggles, cuts a relentless swath through her opponents. Eventually, she is expediently dispatching them with an opening one-two salvo just seconds into each bout. Frankie, who has been studying Gaelic for no particular reason that is shared with the audience, puts a Gaelic phrase on Maggie’s fight gear that gives her a loyal Irish following wherever she fights and aptly describes their relationship—though the meaning is withheld from the audience until the very end.

The film does have a number of loose ends and flaws that require the audience to willingly suspend disbelief, but the superb acting by Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, and Morgan Freeman establishes strong credibility, and the rag-to-riches story develops a powerful momentum. This keeps the audience from asking the incisive questions that would unravel lesser productions.

The film packs a powerful emotional punch that comes from a shocking twist in the story. Most reviewers have been circumspect in addressing this in their reviews because knowing it in advance would seriously undermine the film’s power. However, evaluating this film thoroughly requires addressing the story’s twist. Since the film has been out in theaters for several weeks, many readers will have already seen the film. If you have not seen the film and would like to experience it without prior knowledge, please be advised. WARNING: Important plot details will be revealed by reading further.

The road to sports glory is filled with pain and, sometimes, horrific tragedy. While that can be the result of family losses—which is a theme the film certainly presents for both Frankie and Maggie—it can also come from devastating injuries. Most such sports injuries happen in the heat of competition from which there is no intent to injure, and the term “devastating” refers either to the athlete’s ability to play in important games leading to an individual year’s championship or to the athlete’s capacity to continue with the sport. Here the injury comes as the result of an act blatantly outside the sport’s established rules of conduct. This makes it painfully needless. Not that the act was intended to cause the degree of injury sustained. Maggie suffers a high-level cervical spine injury, causing her to become a quadriplegic needing ventilator support in order to breath. This is a level of impairment that able-bodied individuals cannot possibly fully appreciate but instinctively know that they do not want to ever experience.

Suddenly, the boxing glory and family-bonding picture becomes transformed to one about euthanasia and the right-to-die. This is a very serious issue. The film has been attacked by conservative religious figures for just bringing the issue to the public. It’s been attacked for not being more forthright that this is the subject of the film. The Million Dollar Baby trailers, unlike those for many other films that have notoriously and ill-advisedly revealed key plot details, have kept the focus on the boxing and the developing sense of family, with no reference to Maggie’s tragic injury. Is it dishonest to not tell the audience up-front what the film is about?

I don’t think it is dishonest. However, I do think that it is dishonest to stack the deck in how the issue is presented. Not that “stacking the deck” for maximum emotional impact is unusual for filmmakers and results in anything more serious than occasionally being scourged in print by self-appointed defenders of film purity (e.g., film reviewers like me). The depiction of the health care available to Maggie to address her impairment is woeful. There is no counseling and no physical therapy for her. Within a matter of weeks or months, she develops a gangrenous bedsore that must be addressed by amputation. This is from a hospital that Morgan Freeman’s narration tells us is the so-called “best in the land.” Maggie’s Ozark family comes to L.A.—first to visit Disneyland—before descending on her like a flock of vultures to try to get her to sign over her boxing winnings. The shockingly inhuman depiction of her family of origin obviously serves to underscore the “true family” relationship that Frankie and Maggie have formed. Though the film has foreshadowed the issue of mercy killing through a story about Maggie’s dad and a lame dog, the film now puts Frankie on the spot for delivering Maggie from the hell of her unresponsive body. (The spinal cord injured-disabled community has strongly resented the film’s portrayal of victims of this type of injury as being devoid of worth who might as well be dead. While acknowledging the extreme level of impairment, there are opportunities for these individuals to be productive, and the possibility for recovery from this type of injury has never been closer.) Religion has been part of the film from earlier scenes of Frankie attending daily mass. Whereas his earlier interactions with the priest had disingenuously seemed only an opportunity for Frankie to torment his parish priest, Frankie is now seriously considering the moral implications of what Maggie wants him to do. Interestingly, the moral dilemma with which Frankie is confronted is the film’s most blatant dishonesty. Maggie doesn’t need Frankie to sneak into the hospital to kill her by turning off her ventilator. She is fully competent to make her wishes known to hospital staff and authorize the discontinuation of this care. The right to die by the passive withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment has already been won.

It is at this point that the meaning of the Gaelic saying is revealed to Maggie and to the audience: my blood. The film celebrates the true bond that has been forged and, in essence, makes the willingness to end the life of the loved one a measure of the strength of that bond. We eventually learn that the entire film has been Scrap telling Frankie’s story in a letter to the daughter who hasn’t wanted anything to do with her father, as if recognizing the depth of his devotion to Maggie should serve as proof of his devotion to the unseen daughter. This is, of course, a slippery moral slope, which is why euthanasia isn’t a subject we often discuss openly. Whether audiences will want to further consider euthanasia and even embrace it after watching this film is not known, though bringing the issue to the public is probably overdue. A better development of the issue can be seen in the Best Foreign Film Oscar winner The Sea Inside.

Using the powerful performance of its lead actors, Million Dollar Baby takes its audience on a deeply emotional trip through some terrain that it may not have willingly wanted to visit. However, if the film has loose ends, flaws, and flat characters in its first three-quarters, it most certainly does in its last quarter. Can the hospital staff be any more mechanical? How easy is it to sneak into a hospital after hours? Is anyone monitoring the life-sustaining ventilator from malfunction? Are there any legal repercussions from Frankie’s act? Does he have any moral or spiritual misgivings about what he has done? The credibility that the film early establishes with its audience is very strong and probably carries most of the audience through the problem areas with the willing suspension of disbelief intact. However, I strongly suspect that repeat viewings and open consideration of the film’s subject will make audience and critics alike realize the film does not stand up to in-depth scrutiny. It is an emotionally powerful film that makes full use of its surprising twist, but the material will lose its power in cooler reflection, and its warts will be more obvious when seen more than once. It will join a long list of Oscar winners whose trophies will have a better shelf life than their perceived greatness. 

 

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