Hilary Swank had the type of meteoric rise and fall in her career that feels like it could have been a movie itself. All throughout the late 1990’s into the 2000’s her rise was heavily reported. She had a supportive single mother who moved her to Los Angeles with no money and no prospects to pursue a career in acting, living in their car because they couldn’t afford an apartment. Eventually she secured some work in a small role in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie and some direct to video stuff. The Next Karate Kid became her introductory role to most people but, even though she is good in it, it is not a good film. It wasn’t until 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry that she found any real mainstream success, playing the role of a transgender male. The film would garner her an Academy Award and everything was looking up for the young actress. Just a few short years later she would be up on the stage again at the Oscars receiving her second statue, this one for a Clint Eastwood sports drama, Million Dollar Baby.
This would end up being the high point of Swank’s career. She would go on to do several more popular films over the next few years but in 2011 she ended up mired in controversy when she attended an event in Grozny, Chechnya, Russia that got her in hot water over her seeming support of the human rights abuses that were occurring there. She tried to back pedal her comments and attendance, explaining that she was unaware of what was going on but the damage was already done. Her career began to slip, she fired her agents and manager, and, in 2014, took an extended leave from acting, reportedly to help her father recover from a lung transplant. Her work since then has been less prolific and quite a bit more low profile.
It’s easy to look at this rise and fall and make judgments about whether she even deserved the awards and accolades that were heaped upon her in the early days. The people who react this way generally haven’t gone back to Boys Don’t Cry or Million Dollar Baby and looked more closely at just what it is she brought to those roles, especially Million Dollar Baby which is enjoying the dubious honor of being considered the winner in an already weak Oscar race that included not a single film that managed to the box office top ten for the year. It’s become a bit of a punchline claiming that the film wouldn’t have won in any other year of the Oscars. When I’m looking at film’s though I’m not looking at how they compare to others but rather where do they stand on their own merit. With that in mind, let’s get into it.
Million Dollar Baby tells a couple of stories simultaneously that are intertwined. The first is about Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood), an aged boxing trainer who is living with the guilt of not being able to throw in the towel when one of his boxers, Eddie (Morgan Freeman) insisted on fighting on. The results left Eddie with a glass eye and Frankie is reluctant to push any of his students into championship matches. Now that both men have gotten old they run a gym and Frankie continues to train fighters, dragging his feet about pushing them into anything really challenging. This leads to his up-and-coming contender dropping his as a manager because that title bout is always just two fights away.
Into the gym comes Maggie Fitzgerald. Maggie comes from nothing, scrapping by on waitressing tips and whatever food she can scavenge from the leftovers patrons leave behind. She saves up enough to pay for six months membership in advance and makes it known to Frankie that she wants him to train her. He refuses, citing that he doesn’t train girls. But Eddie sees something in her and starts giving her pointers and urging Frankie to give her a chance. Eventually he does. Maggie proves to have a lot of heart and is quick to learn. She also has drive to succeed which translates into a lot of quick victories in the ring. Frankie grows to really care for her but is appalled when he meets her family who are the worst kind of people, greedy and ungrateful. Frankie doesn’t tell her, but he has been bribing managers to pit their trainee fighters against her. As Maggie progresses through the ranks she gains a reputation for her fierceness and urges Frankie to give her a chance to fight a serious bout. Eventually he gives in and makes it happen.
For about two thirds of the film this is a standard fare sports movie. In that way it has a lot in common with another little boxing movie called Rocky. Unfortunately in the final half hour it takes a drastic shift in story and tone and that is where it goes off the rails. If you haven’t seen this film yet it’s best not to read on as I will be discussing the ending in detail. Frankie is hesitant to push his fighters too hard because of his past with Eddie. He blames himself for the accident that cost Eddie his eye. In a normal boxing movie the story would be all about overcoming this fear and moving on but that is not what happens. Eventually he gives in and arranges for Maggie to fight Billie “The Blue Bear” Osterman (Lucia Rijker), a former prostitute turned vicious fighter who is prone to underhanded methods in the ring. Maggie is holding her own at first but is caught off guard after a round is over and is knocked down. The problem is that Frankie has already slid her stool into the ring corner. As she falls she lands against the edge of the stool on her neck, breaking it. This leaves her paralyzed and unable to breathe without a respirator.
This sudden change in the story seems invented entirely to manipulate tears from the audience and it must have worked at the time because it managed to gain up enough support to win Best Picture at the Oscars that year. As Maggie lays in her hospital bed completely helpless she rapidly loses her will to live. Frankie is destroyed by the knowledge that when he finally stepped out of his comfort zone it cost his student even more than what Eddie lost the last time he did this. Now he has to deal with someone who has lost their will to live. This final half hour wrestles with the concept of quality of life and euthanasia. These things would come across better had we gotten any semblance of this leading up but it is so abrupt that it loses much of its effectiveness. Maggie is shown to be disciplined and determined and when this obstacle gets put in her way she just gives up. It’s completely out of character and goes against everything we’ve known about her for the first two hours. Frankie doesn’t grow or change as a character, either. He seeks council from a priest but he goes in planning to assist in her suicide and he leaves no different. Even his emotional baggage brought on by Eddie’s injury is relegated to a brief conversation and is never resolved thanks to Maggie’s accident.
The film stubbornly refuses to allow the visuals tell the story and instead relies on a voice-over narration where one isn’t needed. To some degree we can blame The Shawshank Redemption for this since it gave us the Morgan Freeman narration that has since become a parody. I’ve heard people say they could listen to Morgan Freeman read the phone book and that mainly comes from his work in Shawshank. The same cannot be said here. Freeman’s voice could still charm the birds down from the trees but what is being said just doesn’t work. It’s bland and unnecessary as everything spoken could have just as easily been depicted on-screen. Here it just feels like a crutch used in an effort to avoid having to make the effort to portray things.
Aside from the main cast, who are all good, the secondary cast is played far too broadly. There is a side story about a scrawny would-be boxer, “Danger” (Jay Baruchel), who comes to the gym but doesn’t have what it takes to ever actually box. He is picked on by Shawrelle (Anthony Mackie), an over-the-top cocky bully who eventually arranges for Eddie to be occupied elsewhere so he can get “Danger” in the ring and beat him to a pulp. In a move that is completely obvious, Eddie ends up stepping in the ring and laying Shawrelle out almost immediately. This character, Shawrelle, is so broadly drawn that there is no emotional response to him whatsoever. He exists to get laid out embarrassingly by an “old man.” There is simply no dimensions to his character at all.
Even worse is the depiction of Maggie’s family. There is not one redeeming characteristic to any of them. Maggie has been saving all of her winnings to buy a house and when she does she gifts it to her mother. Instead of being grateful, her mother berates her for the gift, moaning about how this will jeopardize her government assistance and that everyone is laughing at Maggie for wanting to do what she does. Later, when Maggie is in the hospital, the family comes to visit her, arriving in town a full week before actually coming to see her. They spend that week going to Disneyland and only stop by afterwards to see her when they have a lawyer and legal paperwork drawn up for Maggie to sign away her money to them. This is amongst the worst cases of mustache twisting villainy in modern filmmaking.
Million Dollar Baby is not a terrible film, but it doesn’t stand up to multiple viewings. There is just too much that doesn’t play right with this film. It was infamously written hastily by Paul Haggis who was surprised when Clint Eastwood wanted to move ahead with production without any rewrites on his early draft screenplay. That callousness to the process stands out in this film as many of the major problems it has could have been fixed with some relatively minor rewrites. Instead, what we got is what we got; a decent sports movie that falls apart when it tries to be something else.
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Picture: Clint Eastwood, Albert S. Ruddy and Tom Rosenberg (won)
Best Director: Clint Eastwood (won)
Best Actor: Clint Eastwood
Best Actress: Hilary Swank (won)
Best Supporting Actor: Morgan Freeman (won)
Best Adapted Screenplay: Paul Haggis
Best Film Editing: Joel Cox
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Release Date: December 15, 2004
Running Time: 132 Minutes
Rated PG-13
Starring: Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman
Directed By: Clint Eastwood
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