What Book Is Clint Eastwood Reading in Million Dollar Baby
For more information on the controversies over "Million Dollar Infant," please see the related manufactures section in the left column. We also recommend Jeff Shannon's pieces for New Mobility Magazine:
Maggie, Frankie, and Me
Interview with Eastwood
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Clint Eastwood'southward "Million Dollar Baby" is a masterpiece, pure and simple, deep and true. Information technology tells the story of an aging fight trainer and a hillbilly girl who thinks she can exist a boxer. Information technology is narrated by a former boxer who is the trainer's best friend. But it'due south not a battle movie. It is a movie about a boxer. What else it is, all it is, how deep information technology goes, what emotional ability it contains, I cannot suggest in this review, because I volition not spoil the experience of following this story into the deepest secrets of life and expiry. This is the best picture of the yr.
Eastwood plays the trainer, Frankie, who runs a seedy gym in Los Angeles and reads verse on the side. Hilary Swank plays Maggie, from southwest Missouri, who has been waitressing since she was 13 and sees boxing equally the one way she can escape waitressing for the remainder of her life.
Otherwise, she says, "I might too go dorsum home and purchase a used trailer and get a deep fryer and some Oreos." Morgan Freeman is Scrap, who was managed by Frankie into a title tour. At present he lives in a room at the gym and is Frankie'south partner in conversations that have coiled down through the decades. When Frankie refuses to train a "girly," it's Scrap who convinces him to requite Maggie a chance: "She grew upwardly knowing i affair. She was trash."
These 3 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 torso, doesn't have any padding in his movie, either: Even as the motion-picture show approaches the deep emotion of its final scenes, he doesn't get for easy sentiment, but regards these people, level-eyed, equally they practice what they take to do.
Some directors lose focus equally they abound older. Others gain it, learning how to tell a story that contains everything it needs and absolutely zilch else. "Million Dollar Babe" is Eastwood's 25th film as a director, and his best. Yes, "Mystic River" is a great film, but this one finds the simplicity and directness of classical storytelling; it is the kind of movie where you sit down very quietly in the theater and are drawn deeply into lives that you intendance very much about.
Morgan Freeman is the narrator, just as he was in "The Shawshank Redemption," which this picture show resembles in the way the Freeman character describes a man who became his lifelong study. The voice is flat and factual: You never hear Scrap going for an affect or putting a spin on his words. He simply wants to tell us what happened. He talks well-nigh how the girl walked into the gym, how she wouldn't leave, how Frankie finally agreed to train her, and what happened then. But Bit is non merely an observer; the film gives him a life of his ain when the others are offscreen. Information technology is about all three of these people.
Hilary Swank is astonishing as Maggie. Every note is true. She reduces Maggie to a fierce intensity. Consider the scene where she and Fleck sit at a lunch counter, and Bit tells how he lost the sight in 1 eye, how Frankie blames himself for non throwing in the towel. It is an of import scene for Freeman, only I want you to observe how Swank has Maggie do admittedly nothing only listen. No "reactions," no little nods, no body language except perfect stillness, deep attention and an unwavering gaze.
There'south some other scene, at night driving in a car, after Frankie and Maggie take visited Maggie'due south family. The visit didn't go well. Maggie'due south female parent is played by Margo Martindale equally an ignorant and selfish monster. "I got nobody simply you, Frankie," Maggie says. This is true, but practice non make the error of thinking at that place is romance betwixt them. It's different, and deeper than that. She tells Frankie a story involving her male parent, whom she loved, and an erstwhile dog she loved, also.
Wait at the way the cinematographer, Tom Stern, uses the light in this scene. Instead of using the usual "dashboard lights" that mysteriously seem to illuminate the whole front seat, watch how he has their faces slide in and out of shadow, how sometimes we tin can't see them at all, only hear them. Watch how the rhythm of this lighting matches the tone and pacing of the words, as if the visuals are caressing the conversation.
It is a night picture overall: a lot of shadows, many night scenes, characters who seem to recede into private fates. It is a "boxing movie" in the sense that it follows Maggie'due south career and has several fight scenes. She wins from the beginning, just that'due south not the betoken; "Million Dollar Babe" is about a woman determined to make something of herself, and a man who doesn't want to practise anything for this adult female, and volition finally practise everything.
The screenplay is by Paul Haggis, who has worked mostly on TV merely with this earns an Oscar nomination. Other nominations, possibly Oscars, volition get to Swank, Eastwood, Freeman, the flick and many technicians -- and mayhap the original score composed by Eastwood, which always does what is required and never distracts.
Haggis adjusted the story from Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner, a 2000 book by Jerry Boyd, a 70-year-erstwhile fight managing director who wrote it as "F.10. Toole." The dialogue is poetic only never fancy. "How much she weigh?" Maggie asks Frankie well-nigh the daughter he hasn't seen in years. "Trouble in my family comes by the pound." And when Frankie sees Scrap's anxiety on the desk: "Where are your shoes?" Chip: "I'm airing out my feet." The foot conversation continues for most a minute, showing the film'south patience in evoking character.
Eastwood is circumspect to supporting characters, who make the surrounding world seem more than real. The virtually unexpected is a Catholic priest who is seen, just, as a skilful human being; movies all seem to put a negative spin on the clergy these days. Frankie goes to mass every morning and says his prayers every dark, and Father Horvak (Brian F. O'Byrne) observes that anyone who attends daily mass for 23 years tends to be conveying a lot of guilt. Frankie turns to him for advice at a crucial point, and the priest doesn't respond with church orthodoxy but with a wise insight: "If you exercise this affair, you'll exist lost, somewhere and so deep you will never observe yourself." Listen, as well, when Haggis has Maggie use the word "frozen," which is what an uneducated backroads girl might say, only is as well the single perfect give-and-take that expresses what a thousand could not.
Movies are then ofttimes fabricated of furnishings and awareness these days. This i is made of three people and how their actions grow out of who they are and why. Zero else. But isn't that everything?
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
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Million Dollar Baby (2005)
132 minutes
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