"Million Dollar Baby" packs powerful punch

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By Chris Garcia
film critic, Austin American-Statesman

Posted: January 28, 2005

It's a joy and a jolt to watch grizzled septuagenarian Clint Eastwood shuffle across the screen in "Million Dollar Baby," an earnest and grim boxing drama that is almost certainly not what you've been told to expect from the mealy previews, which promise a heroic sports fable of staggering obviousness: "Rocky" meets "Girl Fight."

It's a joy because Eastwood, who has appeared in 57 films and directed 25, transcends iconic stature to attain an avuncular familiarity that is both genial and ornery — a brittle, broken-in presence delightful to behold. His crunchy charisma still braces.

But it's a jolt to realize that now, at 74, Eastwood is an old man. Those famous squinched eyes collapse into his skull, his forever tan flesh resembles shriveled bark and his witheringly cool growl, such a perfect instrument for hissing movie catchphrases, now sounds like early laryngitis.

That's part of what makes "Million Dollar Baby" a remarkable piece of storytelling. Eastwood is an artist of simple tastes and streamlined vision, and he more than most directors is willing to burrow deep and hard to pin down truth. He spurns movie star vanity for stark verisimilitude, even as he opts for mythically structured, highly literary material. (One thinks of "A Perfect World," "Unforgiven," "Mystic River" and the new film.) Foreshadowing, metaphor and Shakespearean morality suffuse these movies.

"Million Dollar Baby" is a classical tale, quaint and archetypal, but it cuts its own mold. Eastwood plays Frankie Dunn, a weary veteran of the boxing world as both professional trainer and owner of a rundown Los Angeles boxing gym called The Hit Pit. His sole friend is Scrap (Morgan Freeman, a beacon of understated dignity), who used to train under Frankie and maintains the gym with stoic deliberation. (Speaking of literary: Freeman provides grave, gnomic voice-over narration, strung with tattered sports poetry.)

Popping up at the gym is scrappy Maggie (Hilary Swank), a down-on-her-luck waitress seeking a break through the force of her fists. She all but wills herself into the ring once she wins her first big fight, that of melting Frankie's crabby resistance. He's exasperated that she's even in his gym, and her feminine enthusiasm, like a florid perfume he's allergic to, irritates his brusque exterior. She insists she's tough enough.

"Girly, tough ain't enough," Frankie rasps in a voice that suggests he was a fire-eater in another life, then switched unsuccessfully to sword swallowing.

Naturally he takes her on, accepting the 32-year-old "girly" between clenched teeth. An underdeveloped story line shows that Frankie's adult daughter has rejected him, even returning his letters unopened, though we're never told why. It is Frankie's key existential wound, one that has left him wary of people and willingly alone. ("Protect yourself" is his motto, and he means it in and out of the ring.) The movie never pushes the point, but Maggie's arrival is Frankie's shot at redemption. She is the daughter he once had, and his manner with her — gruff love — hints at how he might have estranged his family.

Maggie's boxing prowess matches her determination — Eastwood's staged fights are bruising, highlighting the sport's inherent cruelty, but nothing original — and soon Maggie and Frankie are a winning team. He's a gray spring of wisdom, shaping his protégé into an effective fighting (and thinking) machine. He protects her with prickly paternal caution that's as poignant and funny as the tough-guy bond between Frankie and Scrap, who razz each other affectionately like a pair of elderly lions.

That's all we will say about plot. "Million Dollar Baby" throws some surprise punches that, for optimal viewing satisfaction, are best ducked here.

Paul Haggis adapted his screenplay from a short story by F.X. Toole, keeping it a tough, lean character study, in which every gesture and word reveals a trait or intention. We know Frankie seeks redemption because he has gone to Mass daily for decades (and he's just as difficult with his priest as he is with everyone else). He reads Yeats and is learning Gaelic as a late-life pursuit. Maggie lifts diners' leftovers home for dinner, rides the bus and has frayed family ties. (The movie stumbles in its stereotypical depiction of her scuzzy "white trash" blood.)

With her cut musculature, sleek fight moves and Julia Roberts mouth, Swank never wavers as a unprivileged woman fending for herself. Her versatility serves her well here, because the movie demands her to change in drastic ways. At times her natural spark bleaches out Eastwood, who nevertheless is a riveting presence. The three actors are a constant pleasure to watch interact.

Themes of aging and the winter years almost literally overshadow "Million Dollar Baby." Eastwood, as he did in "Mystic River," shot the film in muted, indigo tones, suggesting autumnal shadows and things ending, not blooming. Frankie and Scrap are men past their prime who refuse to romanticize the past or idealize the present. The film could be a companion piece to Eastwood's sad, valedictory western "Unforgiven."

Even at its darkest moments, the movie sustains a good humor. Eastwood's restrained melodrama is a classic gym fable about the rise of an underdog, with boxing as its central metaphor. Blood certainly gushes, but mostly this precisely wrought knockout spills with empathy and humor and heartache.