Clint Eastwood's Million "Duller" Baby

Rating: 6/10 (8 April 2005)

Like "Mystic River", "Million Dollar Baby" confuses in-your-face melodrama with profoundness. Subtlety is definitely not one of Eastwood's directorial strengths. The film also has its motley crew of caricature characters like Maggie's obnoxious "white trash" family who act more like her personal demons than anything. They live only to swing the pendulum of sympathy towards Maggie in very neatly demarcated zones of good and evil.
But sympathy is difficult to give when it is so obviously solicited. Characters wallowing in contrived dramas hardly elicit interest, let alone sympathy. As respected film critic Roger Ebert pointed out, "Deep movie emotions for me usually come not when the characters are sad, but when they are good." In "Million Dollar Baby," the characters are more sad than good.
Nonetheless, the film won awards for Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Director. This is not about the Academy paying tribute to a future film classic, it is about the Academy paying its last respects to its favorite 74-year-old cowboy. True enough, in the film's last moments, the Frankie character disappears.
Ultimately, "Million Dollar Baby" is "Rocky"(Progesterone version) meets "Terms of Endearment" (plus the narration cut-and pasted from "The Shawshank Redemption"). How's that for cinematic schizophrenia?