Million Dollar Baby (review)
Sucker Punch
Oh, but this is a sucker punch of a movie, harsh and sere and so thoroughly unsentimental that it seems to have active contempt for lesser movies that pander to the audience's desire to walk out of the theater feeling good and happy and that all is right in the world. This is like winning the lottery and getting hit by a train on your way to cash in your ticket. This is not for anyone who feels the need to escape real life at the multiplex. This is real life, as real as film gets. You are warned.
It seems, for a long stretch, that Million Dollar Baby is gonna be a Rocky kinda thing, triumph of the human spirit and all that, if with a particularly severe elegance to it. Maggie Fitzgerald is a tough hillbilly kid from the Ozarks who's wended her way to Los Angeles, where she waits tables and boxes. Actually, that's being generous. As worn-
The sober, gritty elegance comes in the uncompromising performances from Hilary Swank (The Core, Insomnia), as Maggie, and Clint Eastwood (Mystic River, Space Cowboys), as Frankie. (Eastwood also directed, from short stories by F.X. Toole gracefully adapted for the screen by TV writer Paul Haggis.) These are two lonely, cantankerous people, difficult to like in some ways, impossible not to like in others -- she's maybe a little bit unrealistic about the opportunities open to her in boxing, though the pleasure she takes in it, in the rigor of the training and in the structure the discipline gives her life, is heartbreaking; he's no longer at the top of his game, maybe not her best chance at the success she craves, but the renewed engagement with the world she offers him is gratifying to him and to the audience. Swank and Eastwood just absolutely refuse to let anything maudlin or insincere into these characters or this relationship, which is so unusual to see on film: a meeting of the hearts and minds between a man and a woman that is not romantic or familial in nature. All opportunities for mawkishness -- like the fact that Maggie is sort of serving as a stand-
And the film could have cruised along just fine with that, with a spunky take-
Ya gotta stick with it, this perfect, perfect film, for it seems to take a while to get going, and it seems to have some elements that appear superfluous -- I wondered for much of the film's running time, for instance, whether the voiceover by Frankie's buddy Scrap (Morgan Freeman: The Big Bounce, Bruce Almighty, as excellent as his castmates) was really needed. But it all is, well, triumphant in the end, all comes together and makes sense and sucker-
rated PG-13 for violence, some disturbing images, thematic material and language
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