MILLION DOLLAR BABY (2004)

There’s nothing normal about boxing—it’s an unnatural act. If you want to move right, you step on your left toe. To avoid pain, you must step into it. As a boxing trainer, if you want to see your pupil achieve their greatest successes, sometimes it means letting them get hurt. It means putting the people you love in a position where they could suffer serious physical damage. There’s nothing rational about that—but boxing is an unnatural act.

Of course, it’s all Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) knows. As a boxing trainer and former cutman, Frankie has spent so much time ringside that he could tell you anything you want to know about boxing. Violence has been his life for decades, and the battle scars and indelible wounds that cover his protégés have left him hesitant—he doesn’t want to see the people he loves hurt anymore.

So, when Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) enters the boxing gym, desperate for guidance, Frankie refuses to coach her. However, after witnessing her sheer determination to learn, driven both by financial desperation and the belief that she’s more than just her white-trash roots, Frankie agrees to train her, and the pair embark on a journey to fulfil their dreams and achieve redemption.

Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby remains an immensely moving, poignant, and ultimately difficult watch. Powered by Hilary Swank’s commanding central performance, with great writing, assured direction, and haunting cinematography, Million Dollar Baby still has the potential to give goosebumps. Even though the boxing plot’s clichés can feel a little hackneyed at times, Eastwood’s management of the story’s weighty themes (such as regret, purpose, love, and death) ensures that the film’s climax still feels like a massive liver shot.

It’s fitting that a film about our attraction to violence should leave us reeling. As Eddie (Morgan Freeman), a gym assistant and former boxer, informs the audience via voiceover: “People love violence.” Whatever it is that’s so alluring about bloodsports, it’s clear that all participants require just as much toughness as technique: lacerated eyelids, slashed cheekbones, and broken noses are common injuries. Yet, some are drawn to this profession because they are looking for something bigger than a paycheque: “Boxing is about respect. Getting it for yourself, and taking it away from the other guy.”

Eastwood never shies away from this aspect of the fight industry. It feels as though he’s fascinated by the visceral nature of the sport. The camera never omits a gruesome injury, and we watch with grim curiosity as Frankie sets a broken nose back into place, presses white towels against a raw gash, and sticks cotton swabs up a nose to stop the blood from pumping so profusely. This is a rough, tough, brutal business.

Of course, Eastwood isn’t especially dedicated to depicting the sport all that honestly—it’s still Hollywood, after all. Our villain, Billie ‘The Blue Bear’ Osterman (Lucia Rijker), is a cartoonish archetype as the evil and dishonourable warrior, punching her opponents when they’re prostrate on the canvas, as though this wouldn’t get her banned from the sport immediately. Similarly, as Frankie trains Maggie to be the best boxer in the world, one can’t help but think she’s making strides extraordinarily fast. In what begins to feel like a trite Hollywood arc, she simply overcomes many of her opponents without anything more than willpower.

In a rather comical example of this, Maggie experiences difficulty against her adversary, with Frankie telling it to her straight: “She’s a better fighter than you are, that’s why. She’s younger, she’s stronger, and she’s more experienced. Now, what are you going to do about it?” In response, Maggie emerges in the second round and immediately knocks her out. And so on her way to the title shot, most of Maggie’s victories are easily found, and often without any real struggle.

Still, some concessions must be made. Moreover, one should be willing to overlook these overused genre conventions in Million Dollar Baby, in large part due to dedication to character development and an unflinching look at the consequences of violence. Few films have an ending quite as bleak as the one Eastwood daringly depicts, and in denying the audience a predictable, saccharine ending, the plot ends up feeling exceptionally well-balanced: we witness both a meteoric rise and tragic downfall. Everyone loves Maggie on her way to the top… but almost no one is there to catch her when she falls.

It’s a very ugly truth of combat sports. The legacy that boxers, wrestlers, and martial artists strive to achieve is everlasting, but the wounds they suffer, both short and long-term, reveal their mortality. And the legions of fans, who cried their name as these modern-day gladiators sought glory, never see them the day after a fight: bruised eyes, swollen hands, and broken bones. Yet, it’s precisely because the sport is painful that we viewers find meaning and emotional significance in the sport: “There is magic in fighting battles beyond endurance.”

Maggie is capable of doing exactly that. It’s because she knows that boxing is her only way out of poverty: “If I was thinking straight, I’d go back home, find a used trailer, buy a deep fryer and some Oreos. Problem is, this the only thing I ever felt good doing. If I’m too old for this, then I got nothing.” A waitress since she was thirteen, she recognises that the only way she can claw out a legacy for herself is if she fights for it, and it’s in her personal struggle to make her life into something meaningful that the story finds emotional resonance.

The story’s dramatic centre can also be found in the terrible choice Frankie is given by Maggie: to unplug her life support, to let her die quietly while she can still remember the glory and the adulation she received: “Don’t let me lie here till I can’t hear them people chanting no more.” Regret and remorse have defined Frankie’s life for years: with a daughter who won’t speak to him, and a half-blind ex-boxer that Frankie feels he should have protected on the fateful night he lost his eye, he has become a self-loathing, bitter man, struggling with a burden that he never shares.

As Frankie searches for divine forgiveness (both for the sins he’s committed and the ones he’s afraid he’ll do next), the theme of salvation permeates the story. Maggie desires to be saved, first from her life of aimless penury, then from her incapacitated state as a chronic convalescent. In this, Million Dollar Baby remains topical 20 years on, with a recent bill in the UK having been proposed that would allow terminally ill adults to end their lives. The existential and ethical questions around such a choice are reflected in Frankie’s dialogue with a priest: “She’s not asking for God’s help—she’s asking for mine.”

These tragic themes are visually captured in Tom Stern’s haunting cinematography. The chiaroscuro lighting imbues the narrative with a genuine sense of solemnity, as though all the tragedies to be found at this boxing gym were simply unavoidable. While a lot of the boxing sequences are filmed fairly unimaginatively, two characters talking in an office or a locker room becomes far more visually arresting, revealing where Eastwood’s strengths lie as a filmmaker.

The writing is stellar, filled with ominous foreshadowing and Freeman’s sonorous voiceover that never once becomes monotonous. Perhaps more importantly, the narration never threatens to be redundant, with Eddie only ever describing things that we aren’t already seeing. It informs beyond the frame but refrains from blandly delivering exposition. Some things are simply left unsaid and never explained: we never know why Frankie’s daughter refuses to speak to him, and the ending mostly remains ambiguous. We don’t know where our main character has ended up, or what he does after fulfilling Maggie’s final wish.

Perhaps it’s because neither Eastwood as director nor Haggis as the screenwriter felt that part of the story was relevant: whether Frankie ever finds solace in his choice becomes a moot point. He bestows the moniker mo chuisle onto Maggie, which he reveals means: “My darling, my blood.” However, that’s not quite what it means. It comes from the Gaelic expression A chuisle mo chroí—pulse of my heart.

And it’s in the literal translation of the Irish expression that we can see the themes of the story find dramatic resonance. Because Million Dollar Baby isn’t just a boxing movie. It’s the story of a man with a broken heart, a father who’s become estranged from his daughter, yet feels that redemption might still be possible when he takes this young woman under his wing. Because despite the years of loneliness and embittered regret, he finally feels his pulse move—but that suddenly disappears, just as it did before, and with a shattered heart, he accepts that he’s lost a daughter once more.

USA | 2004 | 132 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • IRISH GAELIC

Cast & Crew

director: Clint Eastwood.
writer: Paul Haggis (based on the book ‘Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner’ by F.X Toole).
starring: Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman, Jay Baruchel, Mike Colter, Lucia Rijker, Brian F. O’Byrne, Anthony Mackie, Margo Martindale, Riki Lindhome, Michael Peña, Bruce MacVittie, Ned Eisenberg, Marcus Chait, Tom McCleister, Benito Martinez & Grant L. Roberts.