Million Dollar Baby might open abruptly onto a brightly lit boxing ring, with two men contained in its boundaries and loudly grunting as they vigorously throw their fists at each other, but it’s less a film about the sport of boxing, or the violence contained within the square, or even the types of people who gather to watch the bloody spectacle, than it is about the unbridled power of love, specifically as it exists in a father-daughter relationship. Eastwood plays grizzled boxing trainer Frankie Dunn, whose refusal to risk putting his fighters into high-risk competitions due to a potent sense of grief regarding old failures with another fighter, makes him lose his final star player. This leaves him with no one to train except an aspirant who is too old and too female for his tastes: Maggie (Hilary Swank), a waitress and amateur.
Dunn is a perfect vehicle for Eastwood’s trademark scornful look and familiar growling: in the same vein as Unforgiven’s William Munny or Gran Torino’s Walt Kowalski, Dunn presents himself as a tough, brazen man who is unafraid to tell it how it is. Although, also like both of those characters, he possesses a deeply pained interior, with a long-time estrangement with his daughter becoming an increasingly heavy burden for him to carry; something which is highlighted by the amount of mail he writes to her, only for it to be returned to sender, unopened. Eastwood’s performance perfectly balances the line between hardened masculinity and fragility that few have mastered as well as the Hollywood legend, the latter quality bolstered by the shadowy aesthetics typical to his films: whether it’s the dark corners of the barren gym hall, or the desolate hospital that exists outside of typical hours, shadows creep into the frames from every angle, drenching it in a pervasive melancholy.
Throughout Million Dollar Baby, it’s clear that Eastwood’s primary focus is the raw emotions at the heart of the film’s narrative. Despite his restrained directorial style, a palpable current of melodrama flows through the film, with its violent emotional barrage realized as a long, winding build-up that finally releases when Dunn euthanizes Maggie. The final interaction between the two — who by this point exist in a symbiotic relationship, completely inseparable from one another — is a dosage of pure melancholia. Eastwood’s mise en scène is precise: shadows hide everything irrelevant to the scene, illuminating only the pained facial expressions of both characters. There is no music, just the faint sounds of Dunn’s sniffled weeping and the whirring of the machines currently keeping Maggie alive. Eastwood takes care to keep the images simple: there is gentle cutting, and trusts that the film’s character development is enough to sell the emotional weight of the scene. It exists in a sense of purity, devoid of any manipulation or manufactured emotionality.
Ambiguity is also essential to establishing Million Dollar Baby’s emotional resonance. A lot of this comes from a haunting in Dunn’s life — the estranged relationship with his daughter — which proves a constant specter on the edges of Eastwood’s images, despite it never being explicitly explained to the audience. Eastwood and writer Paul Haggis refuse to reveal a reason for their separation, but Eastwood’s nuanced performance, which balances stoic gruffness and growing vulnerability, suggests plenty, and captures the deep pain it causes his character. It’s unfortunate, then, that so much of the film features overbearing and unnecessary Morgan Freeman voiceover, which feels grating and stapled on only to appease audiences who desire all-caps thematics.
Despite the powerful rigor of the film’s melodramatic core, Million Dollar Baby is also an Eastwood film in which his most unpleasant Republican discourse is most legible. The very essence of the underdog story, for starters, here focusing on two up-by-your-bootstraps characters who must rely only on themselves and their essential industriousness, is conservative catnip. That sweat and toil are the most normalized method of achieving success is a very traditional interpretation of labor, one that benefits only the wealthy and places the burden of failure entirely on individuals rather than institutions. This ideological presence becomes especially garish when Maggie’s villainous family is revealed: poor, working class, living in a trailer park. By portraying her family as conniving, thoughtless, and rude individuals who seek to fraudulently claim benefits, Clintwood pretty explicitly perpetuates the Republican myth of the benefit scrounger and draws contrast between those who work (Maggie and Dunn) and those who don’t (Maggie’s family).
In juxtaposing Maggie’s hustle and grind with that of her “scrounging” family, the film establishes a moral code wherein hard work exists at one end and lazy entitlement at the other, doing nothing to dissect the underlying, American-as-apple-pie conditions that have placed her family into poverty in the first place. Of course, like every Eastwood film, nothing is ever as simple as all that, and further contradictions are contained in the film. Because while Million Dollar Baby is indeed the tale of an underdog who worked hard and achieved great things, it also comes at an impossible price: one’s own life. In this, Eastwood presents a grim twist on the film’s ideology of dedication and determination bringing forth reward, at least enough to disabuse notions of sentimental propaganda — in other words, an Eastwood film!
Although Million Dollar Baby likely sits near the top of any viewer’s list of the director’s best films, there’s an undeniable clunkiness to it. Whether you point to the pandering voiceover, the ideological ick, or the clear Oscar-baiting of Haggis’ script, the film never feels as incisive or as thoroughly calibrated as Eastwood’s true masterpieces. On the other hand, Million Dollar Baby might represent the peak of the director’s powers as a visual stylist, marrying image and material better than he managed anywhere else in his illustrious catalog. Add to that the brilliant chemistry that he orchestrates between himself and Swank, and the patient way their relationship develops throughout, exacerbated in a moment of pure emotional barbarism at film’s end. Here, Eastwood gifts viewers one of his finest sequences: a scene which, aesthetically, emotionally, and psychologically, rivals the very best put to screen across a storied career.
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