Layers

Rating: Null/10 (14 January 2005)

There's a lot of critical acclaim for this film, and rightly so. There's also some negative criticism. Now maybe it's just me, but everyone is only looking at the surface layer of this film. Notably the acting, the characters and (worst of all) the "realism". Such fickle people. The only movies where 'realistic' things truly get in the way is when science is heavily involved. For example, 'The Day After Tomorrow', and even then it's the least of the problems.
There's always more to a film than the surface layer.
Danger (played excellently by Jay Baruchel), for example, is a critical character. He's hope and desire, undying hope and desire, the same kind that Maggie (Swank) had. It was that hope and desire that took her from nothing to the championship fight. Except in Danger's case he's no good so won't really ever amount to anything, but they let him stay, why? Because it makes him happy, he doesn't want to do anything else. He's the central theme of the movie in a microcosm, and that's absolutely fantastic. And as Scrap (Freeman) so fittingly says, "anybody can lose one fight", be they Danger or Maggie.
Eastwood's acting was entirely in his eyes, the grimace never changed and it didn't have to, it was all in the eyes. Swank was utterly superb, the best female performance since Monica Bellucci in 'Irreversible'. And I, for one, don't care if Morgan Freeman's voice-over was just like it was in 'The Shawshank Redemption', it was an effective way to annotate the visual action and provide a bookend for the film.
The parental theme is something you'd expect in Spielberg, but Eastwood had a go at it and did a fine job. It was mainly there to sell the tickets, which, ironically, is the opposite of how Spielberg uses the parental theme.
The formulaic nature of the plot was deliberate, because you're supposed to look beyond the surface layer, to the smaller things, like hope and desire represented in Danger. To paraphrase Jack Lipnick: "it's the poetry of the streets." If such a thing can indeed exist, this is it.