It Doesn't Get Better Than This

Rating: 10/10 (17 May 2008)

I'm not sure Clint Eastwood shouldn't have just retired after making Million Dollar Baby. Because films don't get any better than this or more poignant.
Maybe Clint was influenced by the career of his young co-star Hillary Swank. When Swank got the Oscar for Boys Don't Cry it was said that it was a pity she reached such a dazzling pinnacle in acting, that it wasn't possible to top it. She might not have topped it, but she certainly equaled it in Million Dollar Baby in every sense of the word.
Clint is certainly beyond the days of being an action hero, no more Dirty Harrys or the Man With No Name films for him in his seventies. But in playing Frankie Dunn as a senior citizen he's put a coda on his career with a role that leaves those iconic parts in the dust.
Million Dollar Baby is a generational love story, but not romance, not hardly in that sense. Clint is a lonely old man, alienated from what family he has left which happens to be a daughter and involved in the running of his gym where prize fighters train.
Boxing is integrated now, women do participate against each other to be sure, but it certainly wasn't so when Eastwood was starting. So it was a fateful day indeed when Maggie Fitzgerald played by Hillary Swank showed up to learn the fine points of pugilism.
I'm sure that Swank took some of the points of character from Brandon Teena in playing Maggie Fitzgerald. It's not an issue of sexual identity for Swank, but both characters come from this white trash background and both yearn for something more in life. There are dozens of sports stories involving men and women who escaped drab lives through athletic skill. The only difference in Million Dollar Baby is that boxing was not open to women until recently.
To use that phrase from another recent film classic, Swank completes Eastwood. She gives him in the family he's lost even if it's ever so briefly and he provides a strong father figure that she lacked in her life.
It all ends so horrifically tragic that I can't say more, but that it's here where even the frozen Medusa would thaw out in tears at the powerful performances of Eastwood and Swank.
Million Dollar Baby won four of the seven Oscars it was nominated for in 2004. It won for Best Picture and Best Director for Clint Eastwood and Hillary Swank just as she did for Boys Don't Cry just blew out the competition for Best Actress. And Morgan Freeman who was Eastwood's friend and live-in gym manager and trainer for Swank copped a Best Supporting Actor Award. It's he who narrates Million Dollar Baby, he's the chronicler of the unfolding tragedy.
I suppose the moral of the story is never settle for mediocrity, always strive for your personal best. Even if it ends bad you haven't really lived unless you live that way. And family doesn't necessarily have to have related genes.
This film will be a classic hundreds of years from now. We can all learn some life lessons from Million Dollar Baby.