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.
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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.
As a director, Eastwood's innate toughness has mellowed into a sinewy grace, and as an actor his limitations have become a source of strength. When, late in Million Dollar Baby, Frankie sheds tears, the moment brings a special pathos, not only because we're unaccustomed to seeing Eastwood cry, but also because we might have doubted that he had it in him.
Frankie, a gifted professional whose timidity -- he prefers to think of it as common sense -- has kept him away from the big time, receives a second chance in the unlikely person of Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank, in her best performance since Boys Don't Cry), a waitress who shows up at his gym and won't take no for an answer.
Frankie insists that he doesn't train girls, and since Maggie is already 30, she's too old to have much chance for glory in any case. But her combination of eagerness and discipline (and Scrap's quiet expertise at manipulating his buddy's few remaining heartstrings) wear down Frankie's resistance, and he and Maggie are soon embarked on a classic underdog's journey toward triumph.
Or so we are led to believe. Midway through the movie, after Frankie and Maggie have had a frustrating visit with her unpleasant family back home in Missouri, Eastwood ends a calm, relatively unimportant scene by fading to black -- a subtle, simple and chilling harbinger of the greater darkness to come.
Million Dollar Baby, written by Paul Haggis, is based on some of the stories in Rope Burns, FX Toole's collection of lean and gamy pugilistic tales. There is a pulpy Irish Catholic fatalism in Toole's work -- and certainly in Eastwood's approach to it -- that can also be found in Dennis Lehane's Mystic River, the source for Eastwood's last movie. This picture is smaller and more concerned with the fates of individuals than with the workings of family and community, but if anything, the shadows of authentic tragedy fall more deeply over its hushed, intimate spaces.
Eastwood's universe is, as ever, a violent and unforgiving place, in which the only protections against nihilism are the professional regulation of brutality (in this case by the sweet science of boxing) and the mutual obligations of friendship.
Eastwood is unusual among American filmmakers not only for his pessimism, but also for his disinclination to use romantic love as either a dramatic motive or as a source of easy comfort. The question of sex never arises between Frankie and Maggie, and while there is abundant love in Million Dollar Baby, it is entirely paternal, filial and brotherly. It is also severely tested by circumstances and proves to be at once a meager and a necessary compensation for the cruel operations of fate.
I apologize for this flight into abstraction. It is, for one thing, the only way to avoid giving away the devastating surprises that give Million Dollar Baby its overwhelming power. But such lofty language is also a way of suggesting the nature of that power, and the unexpected largeness of this intimate, casually told story. The film rarely shifts its gaze from its three main characters, who glow with a fierce individuality and whose ways of speaking unlock the poetry that still lives in the plain American vernacular.
It seems fortuitous that Frankie is an admirer of William Butler Yeats, who in his later years developed a style of unadorned, disillusioned eloquence and produced some of his greatest poems: lyrics that are simple, forceful and not afraid of risking cliche.
Late in the film, in his darkest hour, Frankie reads from The Lake Isle of Innisfree, the younger Yeats's pastoral dream of flight and transformation, a choice that makes sense in context.
Eastwood himself, though, is closer to the sensibility of a late poem like The Circus Animals' Desertion, whose famous image of "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart" might describe Frankie's gym.
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