Best Picture #: 77
Original Release Date: December 15, 2004
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 2 hours, 12 minutes
Director: Clint Eastwood
Quick Impressions:
Back in 2004, I was a huge fan of Katharine Hepburn (and that hasn’t changed) and Cate Blanchett (and that hasn’t changed, either). The Aviator may not have been a perfect movie, but I did want it to win Best Picture. (Granted Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t look much like Howard Hughes, but he still gives a good performance, and the film holds up to repeat viewings. When I watched it the first time, I thought, His germaphobia is so extreme! Fast forward a few years, and I was standing in line at the pediatrician, holding my daughter, telling myself, Now listen, Sarah, if Howard Hughes could make it through that whole horrible dinner with Alan Alda, then you can stand here in the same room as sick children until you’re called back to well waiting.) The Aviator is a good film. It gets more and more relevant to your life as time goes on (if you’re me).
Million Dollar Baby, on the other hand, exasperated me. For one thing, it just slipped in there at the last second to win everything (a strategy that only sometimes works for Clint Eastwood).
Also, while I was watching it in the theater the first time with friends, I suddenly ran the bathroom and threw up, missing the most crucial scene of the movie, the turning point of the whole story, when Maggie’s career (and life) veer in an unexpected direction. Because I didn’t want to miss the ending, I returned and sat perfectly motionless, willing myself back to health. After the movie, we all chatted in the parking lot, and my friend’s boyfriend’s roommate formally introduced his new girlfriend. I’m sure I made her feel rejected when I mysteriously backed away every time she tried to shake my hand. I wanted to say, “I’m thinking of your health!” But how do you admit you vomited for an entire scene, then sprinted back to watch the rest of the movie? So I’m sure she thinks I’m a baffling snob to this day (if she remembers that I exist. Everyone in that sentence broke up, so I guess it doesn’t matter.)
This episode probably colored my initial impression of the film. I found it so depressing. It tapped into all of the negative energy generated by the Terri Schiavo case (which was all over the news at the time). “But here’s the thing,” I would say to people. “That story is true. It’s something that happened. This is made up. It’s fiction. Must the situation be so dire? It’s deliberately contrived to be a no-win scenario.” At the time, that annoyed me.
This time, I watched the movie and thought, “I want to be a boxer!” (In fact, I didn’t just think it. I said it repeatedly.)
“No, you don’t,” my daughter would tell me every time.
“But I like the smacking sound the gloves make!” I would say. “Plus competing is fun! I was on Jeopardy! It’s not that different.”
At one point she told me wisely, “Yeah, but you see, you have to think about the fact that you have to be a boxer, not just ‘be a boxer.’”
I am more of an air quotes “boxer,” now that she mentions it. I’m all talk.
However, at another moment, when Hilary Swank’s Maggie was particularly enthused, and I laughed and noted, “She reminds me of me,” my daughter observed at the same instant, “She reminds me of you!”
“Really?!” I cried.
Nodding, she noted with a laugh, “He’d be like growling and screaming, and you’d be like, ‘I promise, I’ll work so hard!’”
But I really shouldn’t be a boxer. I’m confident that I could have a career that ends as tragically as Maggie’s, but why would I want that? (Maybe I should just play the NES Punchout on virtual console—although I’m better at Street Fighter 2. It’s hard to resist Chun-Li’s helicopter kick.)
The Good:
Million Dollar Baby is tricky. I misunderstood it when I saw it in theaters. Because of the media’s endless rehashing of the legal and ethical implications of the Terri Schiavo case, I thought Eastwood was trying to be topical and going for gritty realism.
In fact, Paul Haggis wrote the screenplay based on short stories from the book Rope Burns by F.X. Toole, and by the time Eastwood became attached to the project, the script had already been around for a hundred zillion years.
So just because the news media seized on the similarities between the film and the real-life events surrounding Terri Schiavo (which I’ll discuss in more detail later), that doesn’t mean that Million Dollar Baby was made only to explore questions of ethics raised by buzzy real-life events in 2004.
Despite the drab colors, this is not gritty realism. Million Dollar Baby feels much more like a short story, in fact. That explains the quick turn and the strong ending that hits the audience like a punch in the gut. That’s how the best short stories always treat their audience.
Plus, though the scenario here may quickly turn grim, the movie is not terribly realistic. I don’t mean that the way it portrays being a cut man isn’t real. Author F.X. Toole was a cut man (i.e. someone who treats injuries to boxers and fixes them up during breaks). I don’t mean that it gets boxing wrong. (It could get it boxing wrong and still fool me, but I don’t think it does.)
When I say the movie is not terribly realistic, I mean that all of the protagonists are endearing to the extreme. Frankie is emotionally wounded and trying to make amends for past mistakes. Scrap wishes he’d had just one more shot at glory, yet still manages to be a positive and helpful influence on everyone he comes into contact with. Maggie is what you would get if filmmakers from the 1930s decided, “Hey let’s write a movie about a female boxer for Shirley Temple.” She’s cheerful, resilient, and works hard because she has no choice. Even Danger (who has Maggie’s cheerful resilience but not her skill) helps Scrap make it through the day by giving him an outlet for his kindness.
Meanwhile, the antagonists are disgusting out-and-out villains. There’s Shawrelle who takes pride in beating up Danger (a young man who is both impoverished and mentally handicapped). Then there’s the “champion” who cheats and deliberately injures people. And, of course, Maggie’s family who take advantage of the welfare system and emotionally abuse her. They’re not just antagonists by accident. They’re all thoroughly reprehensible people. If circumstances prevented them from being the antagonists in this story, rest assured that they would go and be the antagonists somewhere else. There is no goodness in them.
To me, that’s what’s so interesting about this story. Usually when you get clear-cut heroes and villains like this, you also get a happy ending. Not here. Million Dollar Baby gives us characters that are almost too good (or bad) to be true, then an ending ripped from the worst nightmares of all of them. And yet, even though the audience doesn’t get an ending that fills us with cheer, the finale of the story still allows all of the protagonists the opportunity to prove their virtue. Things didn’t go their way, but at least we have the satisfaction of knowing that we were right about them all along. They sure were good people. (Eastwood’s earlier Best Picture winner Unforgiven gives us a similar ending in that it’s not happy, yet the protagonist does the right thing. That film, however, has far more morally ambiguous characters. Even though Unforgiven is a Western, it’s Million Dollar Baby that gives us white hat/black hat heroes and villains.)
I don’t think I appreciated this about the movie back in 2005. I was too distracted by the media’s constant mention of Terri Schiavo. I missed the point of Million Dollar Baby. I enjoyed the performances but left the film feeling frustrated.
But back in the day, there was one thing about the film that made its success palatable to me. Morgan Freeman finally won an Oscar (for Best Supporting Actor). No, I hadn’t enjoyed Million Dollar Baby, but if it won Morgan Freeman that Oscar (the one I’d spent the entirety of the 90s clamoring for) then my feelings about the film itself were irrelevant. And I do like everything about Freeman’s part—his narration, his dynamic with Eastwood, his touching relationship with Danger (Jay Baruchel) that culminates in a very satisfying encounter with Anthony Mackie before he was a hero.
Back in 2005, my feelings about the movie were not overwhelmingly positive. “But if this is how Morgan Freeman finally wins an Oscar,” I kept saying to my mother, “I’m all for it.” In fact, if there were a shorter cut of the movie featuring only Scrap’s storyline, called Morgan Freeman Finally Wins an Oscar, I would have voted it movie of the year. (As part of what voting body, you ask? Shh.)
I also like Hillary Swank’s Best Actress winning performance as Maggie Fitzgerald. (The engaging way she says, “Boss,” is very endearing.) Playing a boxer who spends so much of the movie either training or fighting must have been physically demanding. (I’ve read that Swank went through intense physical training to bulk up for the role and ended up putting on seventeen pounds of muscle.) And when Maggie’s boxing career ends, she must only fight harder, creating additional challenges for the actress. But when I watch the movie, I never think of this. I just marvel at how she manages to make the word “boss” sound so effortlessly charming. I never think of the physicality demanded by the role. I would have given her the Oscar just for saying “boss” like that (which is a good argument for not inviting me to become an Academy member). (And she even remembered to thank her husband (at the time) Chad Lowe in this acceptance speech!)
Clint Eastwood won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director, but he was also deservedly nominated for Best Actor.
Watching his performance, my daughter wondered, “Why do old men always have a growl to ’em?”
“Because you keep watching movies with Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman,” I told her. “They’re also in Unforgiven, remember?”
“What a duo!” she said.
I think she’s onto something, though. Frankie Dunn is not a role just anyone can play. You have to grow into a character like this. To do justice to this character as an actor, it really helps if you start out by being Clint Eastwood.
Despite his gruff exterior, Frankie is so sweet. It’s very hard not to like someone who goes to mass every single day just to aggravate the priest. (Obviously that’s not the only reason he goes. And that priest! I’ll come back to him!) How can you not like Frankie? He’s made mistakes in his past, and his daughter won’t speak to him. Now he struggles not to hurt anyone. (His main method for doing this is not getting close to anyone emotionally. So he’s simultaneously not doing harm and not becoming vulnerable enough to get hurt himself. It’s a smart strategy, but you can’t make it through a movie that way when you’re the protagonist.)
I remember getting into an increasingly strange conversation with a student about Frankie and Maggie at the time. I said something like, “Before the movie took such a dark turn, I thought they might get married.”
Taken aback, he protested, “I didn’t think it was a romantic relationship.”
“Well, it’s not,” I agreed, “but they’re each the only person the other has in the entire world, and there are tax benefits.”
This conversation got very weird. For one thing, I know nothing about tax benefits, so I’m not sure why I even brought that up. For another, like my student, I also did not read the relationship as romantic, yet for some reason, I was determined that someone had to marry Frankie. It’s so sad to think of a person being motivated by love to do what he does, and then he’s just sitting all alone in some diner, maybe eating pie while his daughter returns all his letters unopened. I was ready to jump in there and marry him, and I’m not attracted to him at all! (Meanwhile all the other students were listening, bemused, waiting for class to start.)
(Watching this time, I felt very sentimental about the “Mo Cuishle” robe because that’s the name of the cow in Christmas in Connecticut, one of my mother’s favorite movies, so she frequently would mention “our cow Mo Cuishle ” even though we didn’t have a cow.) (She was aware we had no such cow. Of course, if you’ve seen Christmas in Connecticut, Elizabeth Lane didn’t either. My mom just liked quoting movies.)
When I first left the Million Dollar Baby, the performance I was most excited about was Margo Martindale as Maggie’s odious mother. That probably sounds strange (because the character is so repulsive!). But that’s just it. She makes that character so repulsive! She’s so vicious (in the true sense, full of vice. But also she’s aggressively emotionally abusive). She’s so awful that she shouldn’t feel real, but she does. That’s why I give so much credit to the actress there. The guy who beats up Danger and the woman who injures Maggie are just in the movie to be wicked. They don’t feel like real people. On paper, Maggie’s mother is the same type of character. In fact, she may be even more of a stereotype because she’s playing an overweight woman who lives in a trailer and abuses the welfare system. It’s a rather offensive cliché. But Martindale makes her feel like a real woman who actually exists (and enjoys being cruel).
This time, I also noticed that Riki Lindhome plays Maggie’s sister. In 2005, I didn’t know her. Now I know her from all kinds of stuff (Garfunkel and Oats, several shows and movies), but for whatever reason, every time I see her, I think, “Oh it’s Fozzie’s girlfriend,” because she was in a really short-lived Muppets reboot a few years ago. (I find it quite hilarious that she has a successful career, yet I remember her from briefly dating Fozzie Bear. That’s what stuck for me. It’s probably very unfair to her, in the same way that it’s somewhat insulting to know Amal Clooney for being married to George.)
Best Scene Visually:
When we watched together, the first time Frankie and Scrap take Maggie to the hospital (after she breaks her nose), my daughter observed, “That hospital looks out of place in the movie! Look how starkly different it looks from the boxing ring or the gym. It looks like it doesn’t even belong in the movie. It’s just interrupting their reality.” I thought it was a good observation.
Best Action Sequence:
It’s very rousing when Morgan Freeman goes out to defend Danger (though he really only gets there in time to avenge Danger). I love the moment when Scrap becomes aware that something is wrong. Freeman looks so concerned, yet he walks toward the fight so slowly at first.
Best Scene:
I like the very ending of the movie, the part narrated by Freeman. Suddenly the film feels very much like a short story. (I’m not sure why I didn’t get that feeling from it the first time. It could have been because I was violently ill and trying to will myself back to health.)
The Negatives:
Now that Terri Schiavo is out of the news, I find the film’s conversation with that (once) current event less grating. For anyone reading who wasn’t around in 2005 like my daughter, Schiavo is a woman who went into a persistent vegetative state in the early 90s. (She suffered a heart attack that caused massive brain damage, and her condition continued to degrade.) In 1998, her husband tried to have her feeding tube removed (arguing that she would not have wanted to continue living in such a state). Schiavo’s parents disagreed and persistently fought the husband’s efforts to get the tube removed. Because of back-and-forth legal battles, this continued until the tube was finally removed and she died in March of 2005.
At the time Million Dollar Baby came out, I was living with my parents while I was in grad school. My dad was a huge fan of Fox News, which seemed to cover the story continuously. It seemed like every time both Dad and I were at home, I was relentlessly bombarded by that story. I also remember people discussing it on campus, even at church. Schiavo’s case was complicated by the fact that she had close, caring relatives making opposing arguments about what was best for her care. But the coverage of the case prompted lots of moral/ethical debates about euthanasia, suicide, advanced directives, hospital policies.
In the winter of 2004, I was much more excited to watch a biopic of Howard Hughes than to hear another iteration of one of these distressing, unresolvable, answerless debates. And I also didn’t understand why a fictional story needed to present us with a contrived situation designed to be an unsolvable dilemma with no good moral answer.
(Spoilers follow. If you’ve never seen Million Dollar Baby, you should probably stop reading here.)
Murder is wrong. Letting Maggie live in perpetual suffering is also wrong. Suicide is even more wrong than murder. Eastwood’s character finally opens himself up to someone who loves him back, and he’s forced to kill her because that’s the most loving thing he can do under the circumstances. Fine, but I was irritated because while Terri Schiavo was a real woman whose life included the kind of messy complexity always found in reality, this situation was completely made up. This is a fictional story. Why does it have to be so heart-wrenching and impossible? That bothered me so much when I was younger that I really didn’t care for the movie, despite its (many, undeniable) charms.
Plus Maggie’s story differs from the Terri Schiavo case in a critical way. Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state. Maggie is conscious and alert. She can’t breathe on her own, and she’s paralyzed from the neck down, but she isn’t in a coma unable to advocate for herself. She seems to be in full possession of her faculties when she herself asks Frankie to kill her.
I do like thinking about Frankie’s dilemma (when I don’t have to think about distressing politically charged news stories that I don’t want to be watching anyway). I like putting myself in Frankie’s shoes and considering what I would do. To me, the answer is pretty simple except for one thing. I’ve been suicidal before, and I’ve regretted it later when I was in a better frame of mind. So what if Maggie begged Frankie to kill her, then changed her mind at some point in the future? The thing is, she tries to kill herself repeatedly to the point that the only thing she does is try to end her life. And he’s seen her fight. She fights through pain and injury, against odds. She lets nothing discourage her. So if she says she’s done, she’s done.
Here’s what I think. If you love someone, and they’re in a state like Maggie from which they cannot recover, and they ask you to kill them, you should. Is it murder? If you ask me, this doesn’t matter. If you love someone, and they need you to help them, you should. If you’re so concerned about whether what you’re doing is a sin, you must not love the person very much. Suicide is also a sin. He spares her that by ending her suffering. So would I do what Frankie does? Yes probably. (But realistically, I’m sure I’ll be the person lying in the bed biting my tongue again and again.)
It’s a very sad story, though. I also don’t understand why the priest is so antagonistic and unhelpful. What kind of priest criticizes you for faithfully attending daily mass and tries to run you off? My daughter alternated between being ironically outraged and genuinely outraged by the atrocious behavior of the priest. By the end she was just furious.
“Why does he keep going to this priest?!” she raved. “He’s an awful priest! Seriously, he’s like the worst priest. Is there not another church around? Doesn’t he live in the city?”
I agree with her. There should be a more helpful priest available in the greater Los Angeles area. There’s nothing wrong with Brían O’Byrne’s performance, but the character is grating and frustrating.
The movie gives us a thought-provoking parallel (and stark contrast) between the way “Mr. Scrap” watches over and encourages Danger at the gym and the way the priest interacts with Frankie at the church. Because of the inefficacy of the priest, the church comes across as entirely useless. We get the idea that God and the truth are elsewhere. As a Catholic myself, I will grant that the Church has many flaws and inadequacies, but I feel like this movie sets it up to fail Frankie. I wish we knew why his daughter hates him, what she blames him for, why she won’t accept his letters. It’s probably that priest’s fault. (I’m joking, but my daughter’s right. Ranting about that priest is very satisfying.)
Overall:
Million Dollar Baby is a good film. If I watch it again, I’ll pair it with Rocky, Unforgiven, or perhaps something more unlikely. I’m thrilled that Morgan Freeman finally won an Oscar, and Swank and Eastwood are deserving winners, too. Next we’re watching Crash, the greatest Best Picture winner of all time (just kidding, but I do remember thinking Sandra Bullock had a good part. Let’s see what I think on this watch!)