January 6-12, 2005

movies

Fighting Weight

ring cycle: Clint Eastwood (left) takes Hilary Swank for a spin.

Clint Eastwood ascends by charting his own decline.

by Cindy Fuchs

With the peculiarly titled Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood elicits yet another remarkable performance from a young actor. Hilary Swank, who just a film or so ago (The Core) was looking like she'd never again achieve the stunning effectiveness of Boys Don't Cry, is here subtle and moving. As Maggie Fitzgerald, a thirtysomething girl beginning to box too late in life, Swank combines vulnerability and moxie, convincingly bounced off the craggy generosity of her mentor.

That said, Maggie (and Swank, to an extent) is also frequently undone by the frustrating one-two punch of Eastwood's formula. On one hand, the filmmaker knows his genres, and is plainly fond of hackneyed characters and plot turns; on the other, he's able to use such devices to defy preconceptions, to twist moral complacencies and unnerve viewers. Frustratingly, Eastwood's resistance to genre resistance tends to be fleeting, as when Unforgiven's anti-Western rhythms collapse in a virtuous and applauded killing spree.

Million Dollar Baby is similarly spotty. Maggie is an appealingly resolute outsider who arrives at the beat-down gym owned by Frank Dunn (Eastwood). Frank's (inevitably) tragic past, revealed gradually, makes him timid about taking fighters all the way to stardom and about contacting his estranged daughter (he writes her monthly, even though every letter is returned unopened). Add to this the fact that he goes to church every day, only to question the priest on theological dilemmas (how to reconcile the Trinity and the one-god arrangement, for instance), and you have the customary Eastwoodian anti-hero: gruff, broken and really wanting to believe in something, again.

Frank's psychic pain is somewhat offset and frequently explained by his longtime friend, one-eyed Eddie "Scrap Iron" Dupris (Morgan Freeman), an ex-fighter who now works as Frank's janitor. As the film's doleful narrator, Eddie walks you through emotional shifts and narrative details. Frank's interest in reading Yeats in Gaelic, for instance, means he's a hardcore traditionalist and romantic at heart (and don't mess with him when he's reading). When Maggie first shows up at the gym, all bad form and eager energy, the film is focused on the complex relationship between Frank and Eddie. Their scenes together adroitly blend the performers' elegance and rough edges, revealing Frank and Eddie's intricate mesh of masculine postures and insecurities. When, during one notably intimate moment in Frank's office, Frank observes the holes in Eddie's socks, the conversation deftly reveals both that Frank hardly pays his buddy enough to live on and the depth and tenderness of their friendship.

The men's dissimilarities, as much as their loyalties, make them ideal partners. Still, it's Frank's journey at issue here, and so Eddie becomes the wise and solicitous sidekick. Openly intrigued by Maggie's persistence, Eddie quietly engineers Frank's interest; this even as Frank flatly rejects her entreaties that he train her. He's especially annoyed by her habit of calling him "boss," which incites his snarls and complaints about girl boxers, the media's "latest freak show."

Still, they're destined to work it out, as their professional relationship parallels a familial one. Maggie is so evidently talented that, despite her inexperience and late start, she rapidly becomes renowned as a first-round knockout puncher. The repetitive montage-y representation of her suddenly booming career — bell, scuffle, knockout; bell, scuffle, knockout — assumes an agreeably jaunty rhythm, leading you to believe that the film is going to be about her triumphant course toward a "million dollar" bout.

This part of the film is fun, despite and because of its triteness; you know what it's doing and Maggie's flat-out charming, alternately ungainly and graceful, vital and vulnerable. Still, the movie falls back on shortcuts. To explain her fortuitous appearance in Frank's life, for instance, it offers a glimpse of her trailer-trashy mom Earline (Margo Martindale), accompanied by a couple of Maggie's siblings, one a surly girl with a baby on her hip. Frank absorbs the pain Maggie so obviously feels; when she worries afterwards about being abandoned, he assures her, "You'll always have me."

This promise serves as the ground for the film's lengthy final act, which introduces yet another genre into the mix, melodrama. This turn exemplifies the most compelling aspect of any of Eastwood's generic interventions, in his use of the male character for typically female roles — he's objectified and vulnerable in Play Misty For Me, Bronco Billy, The Bridges of Madison County and True Crime.

For all his famous expertise with gunplay and steely-eyed swagger, as he ages, Eastwood is refining his predilection for emotional nuance and especially, his exploration of the Eastwood Character. It helps that Eastwood's performance is so fine — taut, measured, receding — but still, it rankles that Maggie ends up as a vehicle for Frank's journey. While Swank works her own wonders with the part, Million Dollar Baby is at last an investigation of the macho hero's decline, as a model for behavior or emblem of national pride. True, the film grants him a mythologizing exit, narrated by Eddie, the only man who understands him. But Frank also leaves a problem. And after the film's many assertions of this righteous and regretful man's legacy, that seems about right.

Million Dollar Baby Directed by Clint Eastwood A Warner Bros. release Opens Friday at Ritz Five recommended