Million Dollar Baby

What a weird movie. Seriously. Million Dollar Baby is one of the most peculiar films ever to win a Best Picture. For about an hour, it's going along fine, a predictable Clint Eastwood crowd-pleasing chick boxing movie. This is Clint in his most mainstream mode, like when he decided to do that "old astronauts" piece of shit, or those movies where he'd sleep with a chimp. (Granted, he didn't direct those, but I'd be remiss writing a post about Clint Eastwood and not mentioning that he often performed with an ape named Clyde).

But it's not apes and their odd placement in Clint's bedroom that makes Baby odd. It's that the movie totally switches gears at 90 minutes in, changing from a folksy, kind of sappy but at least entertaining and focused boxing story into an overblown, tear-jerker social commentary melodrama hybrid. The film's an unruly beast with a tendency towards long close-ups of aging stars going a big gooey one over each other. Not so good.



Even more odd is the immensely strong critical and (to a lesser degree) popular reaction to the film, culminating in an Oscar win for Best Picture and a second win for Clint as Best Director. Plus, the guy won Best Actor! I mean, that's a very strong showing for what amounts to little more than a solid genre performer with an extended, bleak epilogue. Perhaps this subject matter just struck a chord with people, touched on something that's of great concern to Americans, but that isn't expressed often enough.

Okay, so before I go any further, I will ruin the end of the movie in this review. If you still haven't seen the fucker, rent it this week on DVD (it comes out today) and come back.

Okay, you're still here.

So, yeah, the whole thing's humming along fine up until the 90 minute mark. I can't say it's phenomenal or anything. Like I said, I find the whole thing a bit hokey, intentionally sentimental. In other words, nothing about the set-up for this film really rings true to me. The "Hit Pit," the gym owned by Frankie (Eastwood) and operated by Scrap, feels more like a movie setting than a real gym.

One reason is the writing by Paul Haggis. There isn't a single believable supporting character in this movie. The guys filling in the gym are either egregiously goofy yokels like the half-wit Danger (Jay Baruchel is a terrible, obnoxious performance) or stock movie jocks (Anthony Mackie). Though boxer Maggie Fitzgerald, the role for which Hilary Swank won her second Best Actress Oscar, is well-sketched and fully realized, her family is a bunch of silly redneck stereotypes.

And underhanded manager and promoter Mickey Mack practically oozes sleaze every moment he's on screen. Look at the guy's name. Mickey Mack. Think he's an honest, upstanding citizen?

That sort of crap makes it hard to take a movie seriously. Couple it with Freeman dispensing tired boxing axioms from the 1930's in voice-over and you get one seriously cornball set-up. But, as I said, the thing is extremely well-shot by cinematographer Tom Stern, well-acted for the most part, by the leads anyway, and the boxing scenes are crisp enough to satisfy.

It's not great, but it's enough. And then, the goddamn plane crashes into the mountain. Or, more literally, the goddamn boxer falls down on top of a stool and breaks her neck.

It's an odd scene. In particular, it's odd that Clint made the decision to fell Maggie by an illegal late hit, rather than through some accident during a regulation boxing round. It's just another example of him stacking the deck, rigging the outcome to make it more understandable, more sympathetic.

So, you've read this far, you know what happens. Maggie gets hurt, through absolutely no fault of her own. Things get worse and worse, her family turns its back on her, and on and on. Eventually, she asks Frankie to kill her and he, after some argument, obliges.

This material is sort of inherently dramatic and moving, so there's no question as to why it would appeal to Eastwood as a climax for his film. And Swank's good in the role, believably physically as a victim of paralysis and touching in her final scenes as Maggie, showing a brave face despite her intense anger and fear.

But in his desperation to wring every last drop of empathy out of Maggie's story, Clint goes way way way too far. He doesn't just paralyze his female lead on screen. He repeatedly shows her strapped to machines. He zooms in for close-ups on her bed sores. He shows a extended scene of hospital workers having to lift Maggie into her wheelchair. He then has her no-good family show up in California, only to visit all the theme parks before bothering to visit her in the hospital. And when they do visit, it's with a lawyer in tow, in a pathetic attempt to steal her boxing money.

So, yeah, things are looking grim for Maggie, which makes her decision to off herself more understandable, I guess, but not more meaningful. If Clint wanted to make a statement about someone's right to die with dignity, why does he have to make the person in question such a pathetic, miserable wretch?

I can't believe a guy who has been making movies this long made these kinds of rookie mistakes, and I can't believe big-time critics like Roger Ebert went out of their way to overlook the problems and call the movie a masterpiece. The last 20 minutes or so of Million Dollar Baby is an interminably long, maudlin, silly mess of a movie. For real.

And let's not even get into that end scene. Okay, fine, lets.

We come to find out that the entire film has been Scrap composing a letter to Frankie's long-lost daughter telling her what a swell guy he was. Then why does the letter include a silly sub-plot about Danger? How does Scrap even know about Frankie's private conversations with his preist (Bryan O'Byrne), who by the way, happens to be the Worst Preist Ever? He's the kind of preist that gets pissed when Frankie has theological questions, and tells him to stop coming to Mass, then tells him that killing his friend out of mercy would be worse than anything else he even theoretically could have done in his entire life.

What a guy. It's too bad they already coronated Joey Ratz the new pope.

Oh, and most obviously, why would Scrap write a letter to Frankie's long-lost daughter, a daughter he's never even gotten a chance to know, about some woman boxer her dad represented? Wouldn't this theoretical daughter want to know stuff about her dad, not some chick he worked with who broke her neck?

Let's sum up this letter briefly.

"Dear So-and-So,

My name's Scrap. I'm a good friend of your Daddy's. I used to be a boxer myself, and your Daddy was my cut-man, which means that he stuck Q-tips in my wounds so they'd stop bleeding, so I could keep on fighting. One time, I was getting punched in the eye and your Daddy didn't stop the fight, and I wound up losing my sight in that eye. Now I clean the toilets in your Dad's gym. It's a-ight.

Anyway, I wanted to tell you this story about the dad you never knew. He once trained this hillbilly girl with a rotten, evil redneck family to box. She was pretty good, but when she got to a title fight, the champion was a real bitch who hit her after the bell rang, and knocked her into a stool where she got paralyzed. Then your dad unplugged her machines.

Then your dad disappeared. I don't know where he is, but he does like lemon pie, so he's probably off in some diner eating that somewhere. And thinking about you. And that girl he killed cause she was paralyzed.

Oh, and there was this dork who hung out in the gym who was getting beat up one day, and I jumped into the ring and saved him, even though I look old enough to be his great-great-grandfather.

I think that's about all I wanted to say...Yeah, that's it.

Oh, and if you hear from your dad before I do, tell him to call me because I can't find where he left the key to the laundry room.

Your friend,
Scrap"