PLOT: Trained by two tough old birds in Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman, Hilary Swank is an aspiring female boxer whose journey careens down the toughest roads in life.
As a director, Clint Eastwood has rarely made it easy or comfortable to watch his movies. Even his genre westerns have put tough, challenging and even profound themes into play.
So it is no surprise that his gritty and intelligent drama Million Dollar Baby packs a lightning left hook that knocks audiences out of their seats in the third act.
I won't tell you what the social issue twist is: Clint might make his day exacting revenge for the spoiler. I wouldn't want to ruin it anyway. Not knowing and just anticipating turns Million Dollar Baby into a psychological time bomb. That worked for me. I was devastated -- and enlightened.
The film looks like a boxing flick, especially with Eastwood's penchant for shooting in dark, muted spaces with shadowed faces that suit this subject matter. And it is a boxing flick, but in milieu only, not in its essence. You do not have to be a fan of the bloodsport to appreciate the film.
For the screenplay, Canadian producer-writer Paul Haggis adapted two short stories he mined from Rope Burns, a book by F.X. Toole, an American "cut man" in the boxing trade. So the boxing business depicted here smacks of reality.
Eastwood's triumph is that his film is as sophisticated as any boxing movie since Martin Scorsese's masterpiece Raging Bull (1980). That is no mean feat, especially in the arena of female boxing, which is still a freak show to many fans.
Yet Million Dollar Baby is primarily a story of tough-love friendships and fractured family structures and how the complex intersection of those truths affect three people's lives. The three are people we learn to care about deeply. Each seeks redemption from past mistakes or twists of fate.
Eastwood and Morgan Freeman run a dilapidated boxing gym in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. Eastwood is a trainer who never gets to grab the brass ring -- or rake in the cash. His boxers all leave him just before the title fights. Freeman, as a former boxer, is his caretaker, muse and best friend.
In walks a blunt-talking, good-hearted but seemingly hopeless trailer-park-trash woman from the U.S. South. She is already too old to start to box and Eastwood hates "girlie" fighters anyway. She persists, he succumbs -- finding in her a surrogate daughter -- and the plot is underway.
There are predictable things in a story like this. Even those sequences are rich and evocative because the acting is superlative. Freeman, doing double duty as narrator, makes it look and sound easy, fluid and believable.
Eastwood is the most vulnerable he has ever been. He shows his age, acknowledges the twilight, even cries.
Astonishing!
Still, the film belongs to Swank.
Like her Oscar-winning turn in Boys Don't Cry, she has the physicality of the character down and then layers in the ideas, the angst, the turmoil and the love of a flesh-and-blood human being.
The stakes in Million Dollar Baby are life-and-death real.
(This film is rated PG)
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