Million Dollar Baby

[note: this review contains no spoilers. not really. not that you're going to able to avoid reading them somewhere else anyway.]

At a critical point late in the film, grizzled boxing trainer Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) gives some desperate advice to his fighter, Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank): when your opponent leaves herself open, turn to her back and start pounding the sciatic nerve until she can't stand up. And make sure the ref doesn't see you.

Regrettably, Eastwood as director does something very similar with Million Dollar Baby: once your back is turned, he slams you where you're weak to try to take you to the mat. Trouble is, the setup is so obvious and the script (by Paul Haggis, based on two stories by F.X. Toole) is so ham-handed that when Eastwood's punches land in the third act, you just feel cheated, not knocked out.

Sing along, you know the words: White Trash Beautiful Maggie, on the run from a hellish childhood and a lost father, winds up in a gym belonging to Grumpy Old Man Frankie, a washed-up trainer from the old days. Frankie's consumed by guilt -- there's an estranged daughter he's lost contact with, and still blames himself for the in-ring injuries sustained by Scrap (Morgan Freeman, playing the same role he's been playing for about a decade now), his janitor and only friend. Frankie goes to Catholic Mass every day (every day for 23 years, we're told), largely to torment the priest with the stupid questions you'd expect from an eight-year-old ("So three Gods in one God? Like Snap, Crackle and Pop?"). Maggie drops into the gym unnanounced, asking to be trained, because boxing is "the only thing that ever made me feel good." Frankie resists, but Maggie's Fierce Determination and Winning Smile convince him, and Frankie amps up the training.

It's distressing to see a filmmaker of Eastwood's undeniable caliber (Mystic River, Unforgiven) stoop to such obvious sports-flick cliches, but there they are. Even stranger is the Scrap character -- he serves virtually no purpose whatsoever other than to call Eastwood "boss" and to pad the film's running time with a bizarre, ineffective subplot about a nearly-retarded wannabe named Danger. Freeman has the Oscar nomination and the buzz that might finally get him a trophy, but even he can barely mask his contempt for the character -- he shuffles through the motions and performs his (unnecessary, unwanted and narratively ludicrous) voice over like he's on sedatives. A lesser actor would drown in this role, but Freeman brings it gravity simply by showing up. As he usually does.

Eastwood and Swank seem to fare a little bit better, if only because the script is at least halfway interested in them as characters. But even they end up mostly as bare sketches, as stereotypes more than actual people. I called Maggie "white trash" up there, and I did it because that's literally all I know about her: the film tells us she's "white trash" and leaves it there. Eastwood and Haggis illustrate by showing her family, a nightmare of every extra on every COPS episode you've ever seen, with bare feet and screaming babies and brothers waiting to get out of prison. Frankie grumbles around his gym, snapping more cliches like "Girlie, tough ain't enough"; he also reads Yates and tries to learn Gaelic, for no real reason other than Haggis confusing personality quirks with personality traits. But each actor performs well above the material, again lending power where the script has none.

Clint is hip-deep in the Scrappy Underdog Makes Good storyline here, and the first two-thirds of Million Dollar Baby represent a moderately entertaining, if unremarkable, film. He shoots and cuts together his two (yes, two) training montages with wit and style, and it's easy to forget for a little while that you're seeing something you've seen a hundred times. And if Clint had just decided to make his cheesy sports movie, everything would have been fine. But the movie's tone is completely off-balance -- the story he's telling is supposed to be uplifting and tearjerking and all those things, but every scene is shrouded in darkness, the frames washed-out and tinted oddly green. So when the movie does aim for humor, it tends to fall rather flat.

The tone is off because Clint's goal isn't to uplift at all -- he's aiming right for the sciatic nerve, and when the third act break comes, MDB becomes an entirely different movie altogether. Without spoiling anything (as so many have done), I can tell you that something terrible happens, and certain characters must make terrible, no-win decisions. And if Eastwood had just decided to make that movie, the one about distraught people in horrible situations facing awful choices, everything would have been fine -- he's certainly talented enough to get something great (like he did in the masterful Mystic River). But after all that scrappy-underdog stuff, it feels like a sucker punch. The material isn't strong enough to support either story, and Clint is left with a mess that barely raises above the average.

It's sad to see a great director like Eastwood coasting on his past glory, sadder to see a great actor like Freeman stuck in the same hole over and over, and sadder still to see an extremely average actress like Hilary Swank getting awards and critical recognition solely on makeup and plot devices. And though the Academy will probably bestow its grand prize on Million Dollar Baby, don't be fooled: this is no champion.

Rating: **1/2