Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Million Dollar Baby / USA / 2004

As a lifelong Clint Eastwood fan, I find myself a little bemused by all the praise that Eastwood’s films are getting recently. Mystic River seemed to me a fairly rich, but nonetheless routine police-procedural, very much of the kind that Eastwood has been making since the ’70s with the regularity and economy of his mentor, Don Siegel. Or even of Woody Allen.

The consensus about Million Dollar Baby seems to be that it is the latest of Eastwood’s “serious films” (the category in which Mystic River and Unforgiven fall, but not True Crime or Absolute Power). Again, we revisit Eastwood’s favorite themes: aging, family, dealing with the past, responsibility, and, of course, the equivocal nature of violence. As the film’s ostensible subject is boxing, this last theme is quite fully (if inconclusively) explored, suggesting at once the horrible consequences and the almost fundamental need for violent acts. For characters like Morgan Freeman’s Scrap and Hilary Swank’s Maggie Fitzgerald, hitting people is both their downfall and the only way in which they can succeed in life, a conclusion as sour and fatalistic as it is difficult to dispute.

But whereas the film features some sturdy performances and a clean and refreshingly old-fashioned approach to its story, other portions of the film seem hastily assembled. Certain of its characters, sketched in a narrative shorthand that is as lean and thrifty as Eastwood himself, come across as clumsy caricatures rather than noble archetypes. And the film’s final act is a very hurried and undercooked treatment of a rather difficult ethical dilemma. Ultimately, the film is no masterpiece, but rather a durable character study and a further refinement of Eastwood’s increasingly lacerating self-characterization.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: 35mm Print
17 Jan 2005 3:08 PM | Submit Comment