Million dollar baby (2004)
"Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" is a masterpiece, pure and simple, deep and true. It tells the story of an aging fight trainer and a hillbilly girl who thinks she can be a boxer. It is narrated by a former boxer who is the trainer's best friend. But it's not a boxing movie. It is a movie about a boxer. What else it is, all it is, how deep it goes, what emotional power it contains, I cannot suggest in this review, because I will not spoil the experience of following this story into the deepest secrets of life and death. This is the best film of the year."
Eastwood plays the trainer, Frankie, who runs a seedy gym in Los Angeles and reads poetry on the side. Hilary Swank plays Maggie, from southwest Missouri, who has been waitressing since she was 13 and sees boxing as the one way she can escape waitressing for the rest of her life.
Otherwise, she says, "I might as well go back home and buy a used trailer and get a deep fryer and some Oreos." Morgan Freeman is Scrap, who was managed by Frankie into a title bout. Now he lives in a room at the gym and is Frankie's partner in conversations that have coiled down through the decades. When Frankie refuses to train a "girly," it's Scrap who convinces him to give Maggie a chance: "She grew up knowing one thing. She was trash."
These three characters are seen with a clarity and truth that is rare in the movies. Eastwood, who doesn't carry a spare ounce on his lean body, doesn't have any padding in his movie, either: Even as the film approaches the deep emotion of its final scenes, he doesn't go for easy sentiment, but regards these people, level-eyed, as they do what they have to do.
Hilary Swank is astonishing as Maggie. Every note is true. She reduces Maggie to a fierce intensity.
The screenplay iswritten by Paul Haggis, who has worked mostly on TV but with this earns an Oscar nomination. Haggis adapted the story from Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner, a 2000 book by Jerry Boyd, a 70-year-old fight manager who wrote it as "F.X. Toole.
Movies are so often made of effects and sensation these days. This one is made of three people and how their actions grow out of who they are and why. Nothing else. But isn't that everything?
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/million-dollar-baby-2005
- Release date: December 15, 2004 (USA)Director: Clint EastwoodAdapted from: Rope Burns: Stories from the CornerAwards: Academy Award for Best Picture, MORENominations: Academy Award for Best Picture, MORE
- Release date: December 15, 2004 (USA)Director: Clint EastwoodAdapted from: Rope Burns: Stories from the CornerAwards: Academy Award for Best Picture, MORENominations: Academy Award for Best Picture, MORE