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E-mailEastwood shows masterful touch with 'Million Dollar Baby'
Clint Eastwood and Hilary Swank
Warner Bros. Pictures
Director: Clint Eastwood
Stars: Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman
MPAA rating: PG-13, for violence, some disturbing images, thematic material and language
Heaven knows they reached their confluence honorably. They have to do what they have to do. They can't not.
No "Rocky" this, "Million Dollar Baby" hovers near the shadowy world of prize fighting, but it jumps the axis and spins off in an unexpected direction.
It's a work of haunted eloquence, rendered with becoming simplicity and mature grace -- a masterpiece from Clint Eastwood, who at 74 seems to rejuvenate his prime almost annually.
Beginning with "Unforgiven" in 1992, he has directed 10 consecutive movies ("The Bridges of Madison County," "Mystic River"), which, if variable, comprise the most abundant and qualitative body of achievement by any actively engaged filmmaker.
Several of the 10, following 15 earlier works, are understated meditations on regrets and on late, earned opportunities. They're populated by proud characters yearning for what life has denied them. The anguish is palpable.
Eastwood stars as Frankie Dunn, an Irish Catholic boxing trainer.
He studies Gaelic, reads William Butler Yeats and attends Mass daily -- has for 23 years. He practically taunts Father Horvak (Brian O'Byrne) with doubts borne of an urgency to find meaning in a nearly used-up life.
Frankie's one buddy is the equally grizzled Eddie "Scrap-Iron" Dupris (Morgan Freeman), who lost an eye some years back in a fight Frankie managed.
Scrap, who lives in Frankie's gym, narrates the story in the flat, graven voice of a plainspoken man. No pretense. No embellishment. He'll give it to you straight, because he knows no other way.
"Frankie liked to say boxing is an unnatural act," he tells us. Neither man has a taste for hurt, but they ache a lot.
It's natural somehow that the overly cautious trainer should be discharged by his one promising young contender, just as a rising comic dumped his loyal agent in Woody Allen's "Broadway Danny Rose."
Partly because of the way Frankie dovetails off earlier Eastwood roles, we know he won't accept Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) as his next and final chance.
She's less than an amateur -- no prospect at all at 31. "A girly," he calls her. A Missouri hillbilly.
"She grew up knowing one thing: She was trash," Scrap says.
Her family, maybe. Not Maggie. Been waitressing since 13. Smuggles home table scraps.
Frankie wiles his years writing weekly letters to an estranged daughter who returns them unopened. Got a whole box of 'em.
For 15 rounds, Eastwood hones in as morality and mortality square off.
It's a powerfully tender elegy for an abrasive man who yearns for a connection with a daughter he never sees and for a young woman who calls him Boss and longs for a father's encouragement.
Paul Haggis based his screenplay mainly on "Million $$$ Baby," one of six stories in "Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner" by former trainer Jerry Boyd, writing under the name F.X. Toole.
With the exception of an uneasily inserted side sketch about a learning-impaired fighter named Danger Barch (played by Jay Baruchel, who reaches too eagerly to register), Eastwood's movie is as lean and spare as his scoring -- the lightest-touched movie music since his own for "Unforgiven."
Neither as actor nor director has Eastwood ever seemed so in concert with film as a medium for exploring the cavities of the heart.
Without a trace of vanity in his own work, he draws splendid work from others.
For a while after her Oscar-winning "Boy's Don't Cry," Swank seemed to have nothing else in her acting arsenal. Here her Maggie pushes to validate herself at something and delivers a wrenching knockout performance. Hers is not a portrayal you can watch passively.
As her mother, Earline, Margo Martindale (a fine Big Mama in the recent Broadway revival of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof") gives us in two scenes a life that is about taking. And taking.
Freeman. What a gift of an actor. No wonder Eastwood calls him the best. Freeman's somber solidity allows us to understand why Scrap would renounce the bitterness to which he seems entitled. Nothing in that, is there, Scrap?
You wonder what it takes out of him to say a line like, "Then he walked out. I don't think he had anything left."
The bemusement drains, too, from O'Byrne, delivering Father Horvak's admonition to Frankie, "If you do this thing, you'll be lost somewhere so deep you will never find yourself."
From Tom Stern's plaintive cinematography to the evocative production design of the venerable 89-year-old Henry Bumstead ("Vertigo," "The Sting"), "Million Dollar Baby" entreats us to care as much as its characters.
And how they do.
When it ends with a wallop that recalls "Saving Private Ryan" and "The Guys," the people most moved by "Million Dollar Baby" will sit immobilized.
