Headnote
Director Clint Eastwood's latest effort is all about boxing - and not really about boxing, so viewers who are squeamish about the sweet science should not be put off by the pugilism. The film is a beautifully photographed, superbly acted exploration of the nature of love and redemption. It is an examination of the ambiguity of devotion and duty that would probably leave Dirty Harry squinting in consternation. For characters and viewers alike, this story makes one feel rather like a fighter in the ring feeling that there are countless countermoves, but there is no way around the formidable reality that is coming straight at you.
EVEN IF the august Academy had not recognized it in February with multiple Oscars, Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby would still be last year's one great film. Even its most respectable Oscar rivals - the overdue Martin Scorsese's overblown The Aviator and the promising Alexander Payne's Sideways - dissolve into light diversions beside Eastwood's lingering ambivalences and wrenching catharsis. They turn misty before him.
As some turn apoplectic - in the us the film has been attacked as an endorsement of euthanasia. The charge is absurd. The story is about love and redemption, about what a good man will force himself to do for love. The film takes a sombre, circumspect view of the conflicting pressures on an earnest Catholic whose dearest friend begs him to end her agony. Either decision will scar his conscience for life. Appreciating the complexity of the issue, Eastwood provides no easy happy ending. He does not endorse euthanasia - not in the specific and most certainly not as a general practice. Rather, the film calls for humility and humanity when we approach a suffering soul. Eastwood's quiet script and methodical filmmaking eschew polemic.
The film is even an advance upon Eastwood's achievements in Unforgiven (1992) and Mystic River (2003). In fact, Eastwood's career of revenge and anti-hero Westerns and his signature Dirty Harry pictures make all the more poignant his recent concern with moral complexities and with overcoming the ghosts and guilt of experience. Both Eastwood the director and his persona seem to be reviewing the ambivalences of life. In a particularly poignant scene, Eastwood casts his own young daughter as a little girl in whom his heroine sees her lost self.
EASTWOOD plays Frankie Dunn, an old cutman who trains and sometimes manages boxers and now runs the Hit Pit gym. Frankie is paralyzed by two forms of guilt. The unclear one involves his alienated daughter, who returns his weekly letters unopened. He boxes them in his closet as a bitter reminder of his loss. The other centres on his janitor, Eddie "Scrap Iron" Dupris (Morgan Freeman), who lost use of an eye years ago when Frankie failed to stop a particularly brutal fight. Scrap is the film's narrator. By themselves, the smoked gravel voices of the two male leads would convey the film's tone of grating loss.
Frankie gets a second chance to be a father when a 31-year-old woman, Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), appears at the gym and starts nagging him to be her trainer. She works as a waitress, but has discovered that boxing is the only thing that gives her a sense of purpose - and she hopes that it just might save her from her trailer trash life. When Frankie rejects the idea of training a "girlie," Scrap takes it upon himself to give Maggie some elementary instruction.
Frankie acknowledges that women's boxing is beginning to draw big crowds and big purses, but he tells Maggie that even a talented fighter takes years to train - and that, in her early thirties, she's washed up before she even begins. But she stubbornly sticks with it, and as the months pass she begins to show a fine fighter's form to complement her innate tenacity. And when Frankie's top prospect on the verge of a shot at the big time - drops him as a trainer, he begins to pay more attention to the wiry "girlie" who haunts his gym day and night.
Finally Frankie agrees to train her - but, as soon as she is ready to face some serious contenders, he passes her on to another manager, Sally (Ned Eisenberg), who begins using her merely as a bargaining chip in promoting his top fighters. seeing his dangerous neglect, Frankie returns to Maggie's corner and becomes her manager, helping her pull together everything she has learned as a fighter. And it soon appears that nothing can stop her in the ring. Maggie's rapid success takes her all the way to the big time - and finally offers her a title shot.
But the million-dollar fight turns Frankie's charge into his baby, helplessly dependent. After the bell, the unscrupulous German champion, Billie "the Blue Bear" (Lucia Rijker), hammers Maggie from behind, onto her stool on the canvas, breaking her neck. Paralyzed from the neck down and dependent on a respirator, Maggie's spirit is as tough as ever, and she gamely takes on the challenges of her new reality. But before long she is begging her devoted Frankie to euthanize her. And he finds himself with a second chance to save his fighter.
Based on Canadian Paul Haggis' adaptation of Jerry Boyd's short stories (written under the pen name "F.X. Toole"), the film explores love, faith, redemption, and the possibility that a moral obligation might sometimes transcend human conventions or laws. The film's rejection of apparent simplicities is embodied in its central metaphor. As Scrap explains: "Everything in boxing is backwards." To move left you use your right toe and vice versa. To hit a stationery bag you have to pretend it's human and keep moving around it.
That paradox - "everything is backwards" - propels the film. As a scholar of that sweet science, Frankie studies Gaelic - so that he can read Yeats' poems in translation! Though that reversal may seem silly, from the Gaelic Frankie may deduce Yeats' strategy, where his punches are coming from and with what objective. For in poetic metre, too, the footwork is all. In that spirit, Scrap deduces that Frankie's prize boxer Big Willie Little (Mike Colter) is planning to leave him when he spots Willie "not talking" to rival manager Mickey Mack (Bruce MacVittie). Of course, the fighter's very name is backwards. He should be named Little Willie Big because he's a big man diminished by his disloyalty.
The film abounds with such moral paradoxes. When Scrap arranges for Maggie to meet manager Mack, what seems a betrayal rather proves him loyal to both friends. He gives Maggie her chance to expedite her title shot. He also prevents Frankie's greater pain should Maggie choose to abandon him. Anticipating her response to his test, Scrap describes Maggie's rejection of Mack as another first-round knockout.
These moral paradoxes lead into sentimental ones. As Frankie insists, "Tough ain't enough." He and Scrap express their longstanding love through insults. They show their softness by hammering each other's weak spots, like Scrap's blindness and Frankie's hyper-carefulness. So, too, even after Frankie's constant attendance and care after her accident - he dismisses her nurses as "amateurs" - Maggie finds herself declaring that he is "the meanest man I ever met. No wonder no one loves you." Everything is backwards.
In another display of back-pedalling, Maggie shows her character in dealing with the deadbeat family she has tried to love. When her grasping trailer-trash kin arrive at the hospital, with sleazy lawyer in tow, they urge her to sign over control of her assets (for her own peace of mind, of course). Maggie orders Frankie out of the room, but not because - as we fear - she will accede to their scheme. She wants them to know she is denying them on her own volition, not under Frankie's influence. The paralyzed woman's footwork confirms Frankie's influence. It also proves her sane enough for Frankie to respect her last request.
We don't know how Frankie lost his daughter Katie, but the reason may well involve his defensive guard over his emotions. This we see in his initial denials of Maggie and then in the intensity of his commitment once he does open to her. His detachment is the side-effect of his primary lesson: "Protect yourself at all times." Sensing Frankie's feeling for Maggie, Scrap understands that it is out of pain that Frankie blames Scrap for persuading him to take on Maggie and for her - and his - consequent suffering. At Maggie's first European fight, Frankie's gift of a green silk robe emblazoned with the words Mo Cuishle is at once a public mythologizing and an intimate truth. His last words translate it: "My darling, my blood." With this devotion the cut-man is healed himself.
Director Eastwood discovers love and sensitivity in the unlikely locale, the Hit Pit gym. He finds conventionally male toughness and ambition in a wiry white trash waitress. Such sparse lives can nourish improbable dreams and responsible sacrifices. Though Scrap lives behind a curtained cranny in the gym, he sustains his dignity. Rising to his own challenge, he saves the gym's mascot, the vaunting Danger (Jay Baruchel), from a sadistic beating - then the one-eyed senior citizen knocks out the young, two-eyed bully Shawrelle (Anthony Mackie).
The loony Danger is an extreme example of a sustaining faith that flies in the face of all evidence. With nothing in life but his delusion that he might be a boxer, he is Scrap's example of the one fighter who has nothing but heart. Danger is a bathetic version of the faith that Frankie's long-suffering priest, Father Horvak (Brian O'Byrne), prescribes: a belief that ignores logic and reality. In contrast, Maggie's faith achieves her dream of a boxing career but does not obscure her predicament. Frankie struggles with his religious faith until his human responsibility to Maggie gives him a new duty, restores his faith in himself, and provides a shared peace that his religion has denied.
When Father Horvak calls Frankie a "fucking pagan" he reveals his own worldliness and impatience with Frankie's daily arguments about Catholicism. In Father Horvak's "backwards" morality, he instructs Frankie to "step aside. You leave her for God.... If you do that thing you'll be lost.... You'll never find yourself again." But, as Scrap has warned, "Sometimes the best way to deliver a punch is to step back. But step back too far, you ain't fighting at all." To wait for God to salve human suffering is "not fighting at all."
In the film's crowning paradox, Frankie finds redemption in an ostensible sin. As the priest observes, Frankie's years of daily mass prove not his faith but his burden of unarticulated guilt. Of course, Frankie may have been as innocent with his daughter as he was in Scrap's blinding. Frankie had no authority - neither legal right nor responsibility - to throw in the towel. But he feels guilty for not overriding that "law" to save Scrap. Now he overcomes his conscience to override the legal, social, and religious bans against helping Maggie die. "Sometimes there's just nothing you can do," Scrap early observes.
As Frankie doesn't leave Maggie's fighting fate in her uninterested manager's hands, he won't leave her suffering now in God's. Frankie realizes that even his selfless attention to her after her accident has served himself more than her. He realizes that he has been selfish to prefer his conscience over her needs: "Now she wants to die, and I just want to keep her with me.... By keeping her alive, I'm killing her." So he decides to place her need ahead of his own conscience. His generosity coheres with the poster behind Maggie's heavy bag in the gym: "Winners are simply willing to do what losers won't." That explains how the boxing cut-man achieves a salvation and humanity beyond the capacity of the priest. For Scrap, "fighting battles beyond endurance" is "the magic of boxing." Leaving the hard work to God is that of the church. At the end, Frankie matches Maggie's heroism, "risking everything for a dream that nobody sees but you."
Having given his second "daughter" her desired life - i.e., death Frankie disappears from Scrap's life. We spot him faintly at Ira's Roadside Diner, where Maggie introduced him to real lemon meringue pie, more honest than the city pie fillings from large tins labelled "Homemade." Perhaps Frankie has resumed the new life he proposed there, when he considered buying the diner as their peaceful retreat, their Innisfree. Denied by his real daughter, Frankie is redeemed by bringing his adoptive daughter peace. Perhaps now at Ira's he can live out his earlier joke with Maggie, over his first pie there: "Now I can die and go to heaven."
Scrap's narration turns out to be a letter to Frankie's daughter, explaining "what kind of a man your father really was." After all the heroic heroes Eastwood has played, this hard-bitten loser, finally redeemed by an illegal generosity, may be his most heroic. After all, he's just "a cut-man," not even a manager, but he manages to save his new daughter's life first by helping her realize her dream and then by relieving her anguish. He is ennobled by his humility in preferring Maggie's need over his old conscience. Within the fiction, Scrap's letter may bring daughter Katie a new understanding, perhaps even an acceptance, of her father, for the filial peace that Frankie brought Maggie.
But notwithstanding Ira's lemon pie, perhaps there is no such peace for Frankie. Perhaps leaving the Hit Pit leaves him to wander the world under the mark of Cain, still wrestling with his conscience and with the dilemmas that his creed incurs when vexed by life's complexities. Isn't that what fiction is supposed to tease us into contemplating?
Rather than promoting euthanasia, Eastwood presents a very special case, as unusual as a 33-year-old white trash waitress becoming a contender for world champion. She is so determined to end her agony that she twice tries to bite off her tongue, to bleed to death. Where the hospital conscience responds by drugging her stupid, her loving cutman restores her dignity and peace - even though every fibre of his mind and morality opposes that action.
THAT MAKES this film an argument for love, not for euthanasia, though the two may on rare occasion coincide. In Million Dollar Baby Eastwood argues for the importance of the individual life, for respect for its individual circumstances, nature, and needs, and for loving help. Who would condemn that?
AuthorAffiliation
MAURICE YACOWAR is professor of English and film studies at the University of Calgary. An expanded edition of his The Sopranos on the Couch: Analyzing Television's Greatest Series (Continuum Press) appears this spring.
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