Million Dollar Baby
Million Dollar Baby is one of those movies that comes along and reminds me that trying to make art conform to any sort of list is damn near impossible. I could easily tell you that after I walked out of the theater on Saturday, I was positive that I had just watched the best movie of 2004. But like the others that I enjoyed, it’s so wonderful and different in its own way, that making comparisons just feels wrong.
There will be people that won’t go see the film because it has a strange title, or because it appears to be about boxing. And that’s their loss. Million Dollar Baby is about a female boxer, that’s for sure, but not in the ways that you might expect it to be. I don’t think I’d be giving anything away to tell you that Clint Eastwood doesn’t include an ultimate showdown with either Mr. T. or an evil Russian.
Million Dollar Baby is about little moments, and the ways that our dreams and expectations shape our definition of accomplishment. It’s about holes in your socks and the unexpected words of Yeats. It’s not a simple movie in any sense, but it uses boxing to tell a story that is so confident (and patient) in its dialogue, and so heartbreaking in its emotional truth.
Much of the film occurs in the dim light of an old gym, and that atmosphere is perfectly suited to the wonderfully low key performances. An entire movie could be made of the conversations between Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman. Faces are often half lit, and they move in and out of the shadows as the characters speak. The exchanges of dialogue evoke a sense of stillness that makes it feel like the characters are always whispering. I can’t recall a movie where the style so completely matched the content.
In great films, things are often left unspoken, because we feel them in ways that could not be represented with any credible dialogue. Clint Eastwood’s seventy four year old face reflects a quiet pain that is at times, almost too real to watch.
Million Dollar Baby is a story about redemption, appropriately narrated by Morgan Freeman, and told through the eyes of a man famous for saying no more than what needed to be said. Days later, it is impossible to forget.
