Coping with Elevated Expectations

Rating: Null/10 (29 January 2005)

It's always difficult to be objective about a film like Million Dollar Baby. It's winning all the awards and getting lots of tens. When I walk into a theater to see something like this, the flick is already competing with Citizen Kane and Gone With the wind (or in this case Raging Bull and Somebody Up There Likes Me) rather than Kangaroo Jack or the Ghosts of Edendale.
I tend to become hyper-critical on such occasions which negatively affects my ability to sustain disbelief. Since I am a boxing historian, this tendency particularly pervades my perception of boxing movies all of which seem way too fake and over-simplified as compared to the sport itself.
One time I was covering a fight for Ring magazine and I walked into the dressing room where a manager was trying to force his fighter's fists into a pair of thumb-less gloves.A ruling had recently been passed in New York that preliminary fighters must wear thumb-less gloves as a measure to reduce eye injuries. This fighter had never even seen a pair of thumb-less gloves until five minutes before he was supposed to go into the ring against a local betting favorite. The scene in that dressing room ( "I ain't wearing those f------ things") was far more dramatic than anything I've ever seen in a boxing film and these guys weren't even in the ring yet.
So boxing films can best be viewed as metaphors and as metaphors they can not be taken literally. Only in movies do fighters score one punch first round knockouts over and over again. Only in movies do fighters foul as obviously and flagrantly as do the heavies in the movies. On an on and on.
So I'm sitting in the theater, aware of the maudlin, manipulating nature of the metaphor. I'm sort of rolling my eyes at the phoniness of it all, the clichés, the straight from Of Mice and Men story about Axel the Dog and the foreshadowing implicit within the tale. The too familiar technique of Morgan Freeman voice over. Certainly, our nation's critics couldn't be falling for this crap could they? And then, somehow, I too began to fall for it. I gave up the resistance which was futile anyway.
I started pulling for Swank, the actress and Eastwood the director.Let's face it, Eastwood passed John Wayne as the the most iconic of American actors about five years ago and now he takes his place with Scorcese amongst our best directors and here he is playing an old man with no intention of getting the girl. At this point, I'm rooting for Clint more than ever and I've always been on his side ever since the days of Rowdy Yates in Rawhide.
Freeman, yeah, we've sen this before too but ya know what? The reason we see it so often is because it works. I don't know what the thing with "Danger" was all about but even that worked sorta.
And Swank. Top of her game.I'll be a fan forever.
By the end, I forgot about the thumb-less gloves and the career of Clint and Glory and Insomnia and everything else except that I was sitting in a movie theater watching a great movie with my wife and daughter and all three of us were getting something from the film, something different for each of us, something we won't be able to articulate but may come back someday and provide us with courage and resilience in the clutch when we're on the ropes.