Film - Think

Million Dollar Baby is a film made by old men. Eastwood, directing his 25th film, soon turns 75. Jerry Boyd, the author of the book that inspired Million Dollar Baby, died at the age of 70 after decades as a fight manager. Rosenbaum points out that Henry Bumstead, Eastwood’s favorite production designer, is an astonishing 90 years old. One striking thing about the film is its slow-paced gravity. It seems like the tired reminisce of an old man not so anxious to tell his story that he needs to rush to the end; he wants us to absorb much from the few details he tosses in. This sentiment also appears in an aging Morgan Freeman’s narration, who periodically intervenes to move the story along with a choice bit of backstory about the main characters or sparse aphorisms about boxing. The film is not geriatric by any means, but Eastwood’s stories seem to be becoming richer with an aged wisdom about basic human themes.

Mystic River was a tangled story about people making decisions that permanently affect their moral compass. As far back as Unforgiven, Eastwood seemed to be toying with the idea that we can act in ways that will cause our moral landscapes to contract, and he seems engrossed with these characters that eventually turn in upon themselves. Million Dollar Baby may be his clearest look into the processes that create such a spare figure. Eastwood plays Frankie Dunn, an old boxing manager and gym owner that has just lost what will probably be his last chance at leading someone to the title. His only shot at redemption is a 31-year-old woman who shows up and starts training in his gym until Frankie agrees to take her under his wing. What transpires is the traditional boxing film plot. Scrap, the gym manager who is also responsible for narrating the film, keeps us abreast of Maggie’s successful rise as a boxer, and then leads us perilously through the incredible twist that literally sends the film limping towards its conclusion. Packed in and around this central narrative are the rabbit trails of Frankie’s unspoken past. There is the estranged daughter that doesn’t respond to his letters. There is the mass that he has attended daily for years even though he doesn’t seem even slightly interested in any sort of repentance, a fact that his priest is wise to point out. There is the tale of his history with Scrap that eventually surfaces. There are the thoughtful silences that are crafted so well in unexpected moments of the film. Eastwood does well to let us learn just enough about these skeletons in Frankie’s closet that we don’t lose focus on his present struggle.

Eastwood’s noir storytelling and camerawork elevate the predictable conventions of the script to an artfulness that enables us to see Frankie as more than just another broken boxing manager. He is a man into boxing because it so closely mimics his experience of life. When his fighters stumble back to his corner after every match he is there to literally patch their faces back together. But one can only stop the bleeding so many times until it makes sense just to call it quits or the referee calls the match for you. We eventually find out that Scrap quit boxing because he lost an eye in the ring. He just couldn’t step out of the ring when it was smart to do so, at a time that Frankie thought it would have been smart to stop. The end of the film finds Frankie in the same position with another one of his fighters, this time Maggie. Frankie literally has a chance just to stop the fight, just to pull the plug and put one of his fighters out of their misery.

When Maggie becomes paralyzed in the ring during her title fight, the traditional boxing film is over. Now we have a story about what happens to people that want to die. Maggie is certainly not ready to now face the next horrible round in her life, and her manager Frankie eventually calls the fight for her. And critics have been perplexed as how to respond to such an explicit example of ambiguously ethical euthanasia. Such bold social statements have been rare for Eastwood, a typically conservative director. Well, at least we can say that Million Dollar Baby isn’t a film about euthanasia, it is about these characters that took two hours to develop before the fateful twist at the end. The film simply continues Eastwood’s penchant for characters forced to make ethical decisions that they know will cost them their souls. At the very least, the film seems to imply that the act of euthanasia, even if as an act of mercy, will cost the euthanizer a great deal.