The Triumph of Sentimentality Over Class

Rating: 7/10 (1 April 2005)

I am intrigued by the title of this film; Clint Eastwood borrowed it from a largely-forgotten comedy from the 1940s (and an even more obscure comedy from the 1930s). This "Million Dollar Baby", however, is not a comedy but a serious look at boxing. Maggie Fitzgerald, a young woman from a dysfunctional working-class family in Missouri, nurses an ambition to become a boxer. She asks Frank Dunn, a well-known boxing coach, to train her. Frank is initially reluctant to take her on, because he does not like the idea of women boxing and because he feels that Maggie, in her early thirties, is too old to take up the sport. Maggie is persistent, however, and Frank is eventually won over by her obvious determination. He accepts her as a pupil, and under his guidance she proves an adept learner. Soon Maggie is boxing professionally, and, after winning first few fights by quick knockouts, she wins the right to challenge for the world title against Billie the Blue Bear, a notoriously dirty German fighter with no respect for the Queensberry Rules.
So far, so Rocky. Midway through, however, the film changes tone abruptly. During her fight against Billie, Maggie is felled by an illegal late blow well after the bell. Maggie wakes up in hospital, where she discovers that she is now paralysed. The film changes from a feminist remake of "Rocky" to a latter-day version of "Whose Life Is It Anyway" as Maggie decides that she does not want to go on living in her crippled state and resolves to put an end to her life.
If Maggie is at the centre of the action in a physical sense, it is Frank who is central to the film in an emotional sense. Frank is an elderly and lonely man, a widower with a single daughter, from whom he is estranged. His religious and spiritual life plays an important role. He is a practising Catholic without being a believing one; although he faithfully attends Mass every day, it is clear from his conversations with his priest that he has severe doubts about many essential elements of Christian doctrine. It becomes clear, especially during the second half of the film, that a strong emotional bond is growing between himself and Maggie. He buys her a dressing-gown to wear in the ring embroidered with the words Mo Cuishle; we learn at the end of the film that this is Irish Gaelic for "my darling", but we are never sure whether he sees her as his "darling" in the sense of a substitute daughter or of a sweetheart. Perhaps there are elements of both in his feelings for her.
There were a number of things that I did not like about the film. The characterisation of Maggie's greedy and selfish poor-white-trash relatives and that of the evil Billie struck me as stereotypical and one-dimensional. (We are told that Billie is a former prostitute from East Berlin; is this a reference to one of the "Rocky" films which also features a Soviet-bloc villain? Or has Clint Eastwood not heard that the Cold War is over?) The two halves of the film do not fit together well, the first being a standard sporting action picture, the second an issue movie about euthanasia. It is, moreover, an issue movie that does not go into the issues involved in any great depth, substituting a treacly sentimentality for any deep moral or ethical analysis. As the film is in many ways a character study of Frank, there is more that I would have liked to have known about him. His priest suggests that his obsessive attendance at Mass is the sign of a man who cannot forgive himself for something. Is this true? What is it in Frank's past that is the source of his guilt feelings? His rift with his daughter, the causes of which are never explained? Or an incident in which Eddie, a fighter trained and managed by him, lost the sight of one eye?
Although my comments about the film have been largely negative, however, I have given it a relatively generous mark. The reason is that it is the sort of film which, although flawed, when it gets things right, does them very well indeed. ("Saving Private Ryan" is, in my view, another film of the same type). The boxing scenes are very realistic, even if they did not quite have the raw power of those in "Raging Bull". More importantly, all three leading acting performances are excellent, from Eastwood as Frank, Morgan Freeman as Eddie, now Frank's assistant, and from Hilary Swank as Maggie. These performances are not, however, enough to lift the film into the same class as Eastwood's "Unforgiven", a film which richly deserved its Best Picture Oscar. I felt that "Million Dollar Baby" did not deserve to win Best Picture or Best Director ahead of Martin Scorsese's masterpiece "The Aviator". Not for the first time, the Academy have preferred sentimentality over class. 7/10