Terrific Movie

Rating: 10/10 (7 January 2006)

I don't know if I can write a review on this. There are 83 pages of reviews  many of them good. Many are fair in both their praise and reservations. I found the details wonderful in both their simplicity and effect.
The film starts like something done as a film noir. In fact, Million Dollar Baby would have been an ideal candidate for black and white.
After winning a particularly brutal fight, Frankie Dunne's (Clint Eastwood) championship caliber boxer begs a favor. He asks Frankie to go get his wife's car back, which Frankie does. The boxer comes to thank Frankie, (we think, but there is hesitancy). He wants another manager and he leaves Frankie. Though it turns out to be a good move for the younger man professionally, it shows him to be rather thankless and ruthless. Certainly Frankie is not part of his family: he owes Frankie nothing. We don't see any loyalty and gratitude: just a cold business relationship.
Though there is no evidence in the film to suggest it, I think that explains why he so hesitant to take on Maggie. He spent eight years with the other fighter and he thinks he will have to spend another 4 on Maggie. It's too much. He's tired. He just wants to go to church write his weekly letters and banter with Scrape. We see Frankie begging for the easy way.
Perhaps that is why Scrape (Morgan Freeman) keeps needling him. He wants Frankie to try again. He sees something in Maggie and he instinctively knows she will be good for Frankie. Frankie doesn't know. He's a devout Catholic (about which his priest is almost totally opaque): he doubts he can stand the guilt of the failure of yet one more relationship.
The priest in the first scene is totally unsympathetic (or seems so). He asks Frankie if has written his daughter. Frankie tells him every week. We are led to believe that the priest does not believe him. It is a brutal miscalculation from the church's representative. Frankie is used to that: he deals with brutality daily. Why should the church be any different than the rest of his life? These details are foreshadows of what will come.
What Frankie finds in Maggie is a woman trusts her feelings. Probably the best part in the movie is the diner scene where Scrape tells us why he never had fight 110. Much has been said about this scene. (The best description is in Roger Ebert's review. Check it out). Maggie learns why Frankie is such a good manager. Maggie knows class when she hears it and she knows life poetry when it's spoken to her. Another manager? Not on her life.
There is nothing but love and loyalty in this girl. Contrast Frankie as a father with her actual mother. Maggie does everything a daughter should and her mother insists on treating her as a ten year old who has to be corrected. But Maggie knows some things and tries to be a kind loving adult daughter only to be reprimanded by a fool and a course lazy lout of a mother. It is no wonder she loves Frankie. He was the parent she never really had.
Now we come to the real spoiler. We find out that Frankie really has written his daughter once a week. He has kept all his letters (which were returned unread and unopened).
After a terrible event in the ring, Maggie has her neck broken. She is a vegetable compared to the way she was. She is not sorry. There are no heroics in any of her statements. She tells him that she has heard the crowds and she does not want the voices to go away. She wants to die. She wants him to help her. In her mind, she is the same as a crippled dog she had as a child. The dog finally had to be put down by her father.
He is horrified. He cannot do such a thing.
He goes to the priest. He is completely torn apart. Not even his daughter had this effect on him. His tears are those of someone in the deepest anguish.
He knows she's right. This was a girl who was nearly a champion athlete who now is not only confined to a bed but who can only be put in a wheel chair after hours of effort.
Perhaps because I'm not Catholic, I find the priest's attitude almost incomprehensible. He does not seem to be able to think outside the box. He gives Frankie the standard position about taking life and threatens alienation from the church and with it eternal damnation (the latter implied from the former). The priest does not truly see the problem and Frankie in tears, knows it.
Maggie will not accept life that is really a prolonged death and tries to commit suicide by biting her tongue. It is then that Frankie knows what he has to do. It is the tenderest scene in the move. It is so touching that no one with feelings can avoid registering the over powering human conflicts that take only minutes to show. It is one of the great love scenes ever made. Who knew that Dirty Harry had it in him? In the end we are left with Scrape who tries to explain to Frankie's daughter the nature of the man she has stubbornly refused to have anything to do with. She is making a terrible mistake in not acknowledging him. Scrape does it not for Frankie. He does it for her.
If there are people who thought this was an OK movie, they either did not see the one I did, or they can't feel. It is the summary of a man's life and it has nothing to do with occupation. It has to do with value.