"Million Dollar Baby" Flirts With Greatness

Rating: Null/10 (22 December 2004)

Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman and Hilary Swank are three of our national treasures who happen to be actors. With a cast of this caliber, movie fans are compelled by logic to pay serious attention. As many of us already know, these three leads and the entire cast of "Million Dollar Baby" do NOT disappoint. This story of a not-quite-young woman's journey to the top of the boxing sport delivers a wallop from the opening bell to the closing credits.
Through the first two acts I was convinced I was seeing the American version of storytelling greatness unfolding upon the screen. Through a combination of deep athletic talent, deeper courage and, beyond even that, something intangible and, perhaps, spiritual, boxer Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) (known to fans in the story by a Gaelic name I can neither spell nor pronounce) earns her shot at a major title fight. The protracted action of the title fight (as do all of the fight scenes) delivers the kind excitement that had me concluding this is the best boxing movie since "Raging Bull." When the fight is over, Maggie's upward momentum is tragically broken.
And then comes the start of the third act. If there's a problem with the third act, which many will dispute, it's that the movie's dramatic momentum collapses in perfect parallel with the collapse of Maggie's career momentum. This, I believe, happens because the third act makes a sharp turn away from being a hard-boiled action-drama focused upon desire to being a four-hanky tearjerker about euthanasia. For an uncomfortably long interval of the third act, we're allowed to ponder the significance of the dirty fight business, to simmer with hatred for Maggie's one-dimensionally evil family and to psychologize about fight manager/trainer Frankie Dunne's (Clint Eastwood) tragic character flaw. Individually, all of these story elements are good; in combination, the story starts feeling over-the-top in the waterworks department. I was seriously fearful about boxing gym manager Scrap Dupris (Morgan Freeman) not appearing again; but then he does reappear and, thankfully, his conflict with Frankie resumes. The resumption (and resolution) of this conflict partially redeems the heretofore tearjerker third act by turning back the story to the hard-boiled account of epic desire made good by a champion.
Euthanasia, although understandable as the preferred choice of a fallen warrior, as a story element still carries too much of a charge to share center stage with another major story element, and thus much of the third act meshes poorly with the first two acts from the standpoint of momentum. For the most part, the third act on its own is good, but it awkwardly meshes with the first two acts. The problem may stem from the fact that the movie is cobbled together from the short stories of boxing manager F.X. Toole, as opposed to being an adaptation of a feature-length story. This may very well mean that the full arc of Maggie's story is a creation of the screenwriter not intended by the original author.
For the first two acts this movie waltzes across the floorboards, held gloriously within the close embrace of greatness. It sputters and stumbles into the third act, and then it recovers its balance before the final curtain.