Million Dollar Baby

It's impossible not to feel sympathy for the lobby group that has attacked this, Clint Eastwood's 26th film as director. Alert readers will already know what the fuss has been about but, in order to preserve the surprise of a major fifth-act plot twist, I won't get specific. Suffice it to say that when the film turns abruptly from a female Rocky into a fraught and lumbering existential drama, it does so with scant respect for hospital procedure or medical realities. But worse, watching Eastwood (actor and director) grappling with the moral conundrum he has presented himself with is like watching a fat man trying to get out of a sports car: it looks ridiculous but there's something touching about the intensity of the task.

That said, there's much to like about the film, scripted by TV veteran Paul Haggis from a 2000 series of short stories by boxing veteran F.X. Toole. Swank, always impressive, is terrific as the fighter Maggie, a self-described hillbilly who works in greasy-spoon cafes and dreams of glory in the ring. She has a winning blend of fragility and determination and her work in mid-film scenes - when her whirlwind knockout punching becomes a delightful running gag - is a genuine pleasure.

Freeman, who narrates in a sonorous baritone voiceover, is characteristically distinguished as Scrap, a former fighter, now a barely paid caretaker at The Hit Pit, a seedy downtown boxers' gym.

Eastwood's performance, however, is far less impressive. He plays gym owner Frankie Dunn, who as a "cut man" used to clean up boxers' bloody faces between rounds, but who now presides cantankerously over the fortunes of likely losers. His skin hanging in pouchy folds, he looks a little like a plucked buzzard, which is apt for the ornery, embittered figure he is trying to create. But his single facial expression is a permanent frown, half-injured and half-puzzled.

 

The movie, until that twist, is a conventionally plotted drama of sporting triumph and Eastwood directs with a spare and unshowy intelligence, focusing so tightly on his characters that the context is almost invisible (though anyone familiar with LA's geography may wonder how a dirt-poor, carless downtown waitress goes jogging at dawn on the beach). The boxing sequences are extraordinarily convincing and the film conjures a sense of the ring and the ringside so clearly you can almost smell it.

But, taken as a whole, the film doesn't work because it feels so contrived. Elements keep getting jammed into the storyline so roughly that you know instantly how they'll later be used. Frank's a regular churchgoer who pesters the priest to explain doctrinal mysteries (prepare for a crisis of faith); Frank has an estranged daughter who keeps returning his letters unopened (prepare for his initially spiky relationship with Maggie to become like a father-daughter one); Frank studies Gaelic (prepare for Maggie's fighting robes to sport a harp and a Gaelic name which will be translated for us only in the last scene).

Critics in America - where sporting triumph and hospital tribulation are cultural staples - have thrilled to a movie that looks like doing well in the awards season. To non-American eyes it is more likely to seem what it is: a bunch of shop-worn cliches served up by people who could, and should, have done something much better.

CAST: Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman
DIRECTOR: Clint Eastwood
RUNNING TIME: 132 mins
RATING: M, adult themes
SCREENING: Village, Rialto, Hoyts