Starring: Starring Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman
Director: Clint Eastwood
Rated: M15+
IF you intend to see the Clint Eastwood film Million Dollar Baby about a female boxer who has plenty of bouts as well as some serious issues and don’t want to know about the twist turns, it is better to go to see the film and not read on.
On the other hand, if you are reading further, you have seen the film and are thinking over its questions.
Eastwood has proven himself not only as a legendary screen presence but also one of Hollywood’s most important directors.
After the success of Mystic River, it is, at first, a surprise that he has turned his attention to the world of boxing.
He is obviously at home in this world as he plays a grizzled trainer with guilt memories of abandoning his daughter and being responsible for fighters’ injuries.
In his old age, he is trying to be protective, especially of his champions. He also goes to Mass every morning and spars with the priest over personal spirituality and theological and moral issues.
His best friend and sometime confidant is Scrap (Morgan Freeman), former fighter and general manager and cleaner upper of the gym.
The gym attracts some good fighters and some oddballs as well, all tolerated by Frank (Eastwood) – except for Margaret Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), who is from a ‘white trash’ background but who has a knockout gift for fighting.
He says she is not tough enough – girlie! Naturally, she wears him down and mellows a lot of his sourness.
The film is narrated by Morgan Freeman in his wonderful resonant voice that he used in The Shawshank Redemption.
The first two acts of the film focus on Frank, Scrap and Margaret’s training. The second act is Margaret’s success in the ring.
Not knowing what was to come, the scene of Margaret’s knockout at the hands of a vicious fighter was more than a shock. It was disbelief.
This means that the third act is not what we might have been expecting.
Margaret is a quadriplegic, entirely dependent on nursing and machines. She is abandoned by her greedy hillbilly family but Frank is absolutely devoted.
Then she asks him to turn off the machines. Frank’s crisis is not only the morality of doing this, but also what effect it will have on him and his guilt about fighters’ injuries, destroying a second chance at having a daughter, not being protective enough.
He discusses the issue with the priest who is rather cold yet supportively challenging.
This means that the resolution of the film is based on emotional response to the situation, the morality of using extraordinary means to keep a person alive, the request for assisted suicide.
It leaves the audience who has gone to see a boxing movie going out of the cinema needing to give more thought to the moral issues, at an intellectual principle level and at an emotional level, to ask whether compassion is the final criterion – and what are the immediate and long-term consequences.
Million Dollar Baby, so well directed by Eastwood, with excellent performances, especially by Hilary Swank as a fighter and as a quadriplegic, is a film for questioning and reflection.
