'Million Dollar Baby' packs a massive punch

Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby is the best movie released by a major Hollywood studio this year and not because it is the grandest, the most ambitious or even the most original. On the contrary, it is a quiet, intimately scaled three-person drama directed in a patient, easygoing style without any of the displays of allusive cleverness or formal gimmickry that so often masquerade as important filmmaking these days.

At first glance, the story about a grizzled boxing trainer whose hard heart is melted by a spunky young fighter seems about as fresh as a well-worn gym shoe. This is a Warner Brothers release, and if it were not in color (and if the young fighter in question were not female), Million Dollar Baby, with its open-hearted mixture of sentiment and grit, might almost be mistaken for a picture from the studio's 1934 lineup that was somehow mislaid for 70 years.

Which is not to say that Eastwood, who is of Depression-era vintage himself (he will turn 75 next year), is interested in nostalgia, in the self-conscious quotation of a bygone cinematic tradition, or even in simplicity for its own sake. With its careful, unassuming naturalism, its visual thrift and its emotional directness, Million Dollar Baby feels at once contemporary and classical, a work of utter mastery that at the same time has nothing in particular to prove.

Eastwood treats the conventions of the boxing-movie genre, its measured alternations of adversity and redemption, like the chord changes to a familiar song -- the kind of standard that can, in the hands of a deft and sensitive musician, be made to yield fresh meanings and unexpected reservoirs of deep and difficult emotion.

Eastwood (who, speaking of music, also composed the film's gentle, unobtrusive score) plays Frankie Dunn, the owner of a tidy, beat-up gym tucked away in a shabby corner of Los Angeles. His best friend, who supplies world-weary voiceover narration to help the plot through its occasional thickets, is Eddie Dupris, (Morgan Freeman) a former fighter nicknamed Scrap whom Frankie managed long ago.

Both men carry some heavy frustration and regret -- Frankie has lost a daughter, Scrap has lost an eye -- but they bear the weight gracefully and with good-humored fatalism, reconciled to loneliness and the diminishing returns of age. Scrap spars with the young would-be tough guys who hang out in the gym and watches out for the slow-witted orphan who is both their mascot and their scapegoat.

Frankie, meanwhile, reads Yeats, studies Gaelic and goes to Mass every day, mainly to annoy the prickly young priest with inane theological challenges. The banter between Scrap and Frankie -- the way that Freeman's warmth and wit play against Eastwood's gruff reserve -- is one of the movie's chief pleasures, and for long, satisfying spells Eastwood pushes aside the demands of storytelling to savor the comforts and abrasions of longtime friendship.

Frankie is the latest in a lengthening line of crusty old-timers Eastwood has played since he became eligible for AARP membership, joining the gunnery sergeant in Heartbreak Ridge and the retired astronaut from Space Cowboys (among many others) in an unequaled pantheon of leathery masculinity. Perhaps no American actor besides Gene Hackman (who joined Eastwood and Freeman in Unforgiven) has ripened with such relish, becoming more fully and complicatedly himself as he grows older.