Million Dollar Baby: Intimate Space, Great Allure

Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby is the best movie released by a major Hollywood studio this year, and not because it is the grandest, the most ambitious or even the most original. On the contrary: it is a quiet, intimately scaled three-person drama directed in a patient, easygoing style, without any of the displays of allusive¹ cleverness or formal gimmickry² that so often masquerade³ as important filmmaking these days.

Million Dollar Baby, written by Paul Haggis, is based on some of the stories in Rope Burns, F. X. Toole’s collection of lean and gamy⁴ pugilistic⁵ tales. At first glance the story, about a grizzled⁶ boxing trainer whose hard heart is melted by a spunky⁷ young fighter, seems about as fresh as a well-worn gym shoe. This is a Warner Brothers release, and if it were not in color (and if the young fighter in question were not female), Million Dollar Baby, with its open-hearted mixture of sentiment and grit⁸, might almost be mistaken for a picture from the studio’s 1934 lineup that was somehow mislaid for 70 years.

Mr. Eastwood plays Frankie Dunn, the owner of a tidy, beat-up gym tucked away in a shabby corner of Los Angeles. His best friend, who supplies world-weary voiceover narration to help the plot through its occasional thickets, is Eddie Dupris, (Morgan Freeman) a former fighter (nicknamed Scrap) whom Frankie managed long ago.

Both men carry some heavy frustration and regret -- Frankie has lost a daughter, Scrap has lost an eye -- but they bear the weight gracefully and with good-humored fatalism⁹, reconciled to loneliness and the diminishing returns of age. Scrap spars¹⁰ with the young would-be tough guys who hang out in the gym and watches out for the slow-witted orphan who is both their mascot and their scapegoat¹¹. Frankie, meanwhile, reads Yeats, studies Gaelic and goes to Mass every day, mainly to annoy the prickly young priest with inane¹² theological challenges. The banter¹³ between Scrap and Frankie -- the way that Mr. Freeman’s warmth and wit play against Mr. Eastwood’s gruff¹⁴ reserve -- is one of the movie’s chief pleasures.

Frankie, a gifted professional whose timidity has kept him away from the big time, receives a second chance in the unlikely person of Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank, in her best performance since Boys Don’t Cry), a waitress who shows up at his gym and won’t take no for an answer. Frankie insists that he doesn’t train girls, and since Maggie is already 30, she’s too old to have much chance for glory in any case. But her combination of eagerness and discipline wear down Frankie’s resistance, and he and Maggie are soon embarked on a classic underdog¹⁵’s journey toward triumph.