Issues and SPOILERS

Rating: Null/10 (31 January 2005)

I'm not sure why everyone is so worried about a spoiler for this picture. I've heard it compared to "The Crying Game" and "The Sixth Sense" in terms of the necessity of keeping a secret. Actually the sudden shift in this story is not that kind of shocker. It's just a dramatic turning point that would have the same effect even if someone knew it was going to happen. It's more like the knowledge that Hillary Swank was a woman playing a man in "Boy's Don't Cry". It's just part of the story. If it had happened earlier, everybody would be talking about it as that was what the movie was about.
I bring it up here because I've read that the National Spinal Cord Injury Association has claimed that Clint Eastwood made this film as a "vendetta against disabled people" in response to a 1997 lawsuit by a woman who sued him 8 years ago for the lack of handicapped access in a rest room of a building he owned. This is obviously ridiculous, as Eastwood didn't write this story and he doesn't make movies as vendetta against law suit claimants. It always distresses me when advocacy groups that have a legitimate cause invent controversies to call attention to themselves when there are real problems that need such light shed on them and innocent people get condemned by their actions.
In this film the deterioration of Swank's paralyzed character seems accelerated for dramatic effect, (it took Chris Reeve nearly a decade to die of the same thing), and to justify Eastwood's actions. I find judging people in such circumstances difficult. It's like announcing what you would do if the last lifeboat on the Titanic had one seat left. You just don't know because you've not been in that situation. It certainly seems to me that wanting to continue under such circumstances is, in the end, a private decision, rather than a public one.
I think a greater, unspoken issue with the film is the need to have a white protagonist in a sport dominated by blacks and Hispanics. Of course, the action we see could certainly have taken place but some of the scenes where Swank, as a sort of female Marciano, batters black and Hispanic rivals brought back ugly memories of sitting in a theater with a bunch of raucous white males rooting for Rocky to beat "Clubber" Lang, something their real hero, Gerry Cooney, could not do to Larry Holmes, (in a closed circuit broadcast I attended shortly before that). It's not as blatant an attempt to pander to the larger white audience as that but it brought back those memories. Just as Rocky III was made "OK" because Apollo Creed had befriended Rocky, the fact that Swank is white and most of these opponents, (and the cocky jerk in the gym), are black is supposed to be leavened by the presence of Morgan Freeman as the hero's and heroine's friend.
Like other things in the movie, it's contrivance. All of the protagonists in this film are totally sympathetic. Various elements are injected into the story to make us feel for them. Eastwood's daughter doesn't like him for reasons which are not made clear. Swank's family seems to have arrived on a sight-seeing trip from "Boys Don't Cry", (which, aside from Swank's amazing performance is probably the most singularly unpleasant film ever made). Freeman, for the umpteenth time since "Glory", is the moral center of everyone's universe. They are agreeable people played by some of our finest actors but if this film were a fight, it would be considered "fixed".
Still, it's well done for what it is. Several members of the audience in the theater I was in broke out crying, so it had its intended effect. Tear-jerkers, which is what this film becomes, are not my favorite genre. If they don't work, they seem appalling maudlin and silly. If they do, they take me places I don't necessarily want to go.
My vote for the best film of the year goes to "The Aviator". The best fight film ever is still "The Set Up". And as for female boxing movies, I'll still take "Girlfight", a much less pretentious film that is simply a character study of a troubled young girl who finds herself in the boxing ring.