Million Dollar Baby

Million Dollar Baby

Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, winner of 4 2004 Academy Awards for:            

• Best Director                 Clint Eastwood         
• Best Actress                  Hilary Swank
• Best Supporting Actor    Morgan Freeman
• Best Picture

...is one of those rare, reasonably low budget movies about people, real people, like Driving Miss Daisy, which pop up every now and then and deservingly captivate the global audience.

Starting with Paul Haggis' delicately simple script, adapted from "Rope Burns" a collection of short stories by F.X. Toole...

F. X. Toole: Million Dollar Baby novel

"...The story of the 69-year-old author of this astonishing first fiction collection is a salutary one; he wrote between gigs tending boxers in their corners as a "cut man" (who stanches the blood flow and allows fights to continue), finally got a story published by a small literary magazine, was spotted by a keen-eyed agent and achieved book publication.

It's amazing it took so long, because Irish-born Toole, now living and working in Los Angeles, is a natural. His knowledge of the bizarre world of professional boxing is encyclopedic and utterly persuasive, his prose is as tight as a well-laced pair of gloves and his protagonists, in this collection of five stories and a novella, are mythically heroic (and occasionally evil) but convincing archetypes..." Amazon blurb

...Million Dollar Baby is the real thing - visually memorable, totally emotionally captivating, anchored by 3 great acting performances and certainly worthy of repeated viewing. 

It's the story of two loners, Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood), a boxing trainer and Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), a 31 year old piece of trailer trash who gets it into her head that she can become a champion female boxer.

Million Dollar Baby trailer

Of course, Frankie doesn't want anything to do with the "freak show" of female boxing but after he losing his best fighter (who subsequently wins the world title) to a rival coach, he reluctantly relents to her badgering and decides to coach her.

There are a few minor sub-plots thrown in:

• Frankie's hounding of his local priest for theological instruction
• his sad attempts to patch up his relationship with his estranged daughter
• "Danger" Barch (Jay Baruchel), a skinny low IQ "orphan" who finds refuge in Frankie's gym &
• most powerful of all, Maggie's callous redneck family

...with all these disparate threads being woven together by Morgan Freeman's superb performance and narration as Eddie "Scrap Iron" Dupris, a former boxing Pro, formerly coached by Frankie and now helping him run his gym.

Cut to the chase: Maggie blossoms under Frankie's tutelage and lands a title fight with the vicious champion, Billy "The Blue Bear" (Licia Rijker), which has catastrophic results. 

Million Dollar Baby is no feel-good movie. It's sombre, quiet and dignified with Eastwood overseeing it all, like an austere Red Indian chief surveying the chaos that the white men have brought to the plains.

Million Dollar Baby DVD

If you haven't seen Million Dollar Baby, you should. Serious movies seldom get any better.

see also:

• wikipedia Million Dollar Baby
• Clint Eastwood video talking about Million Dollar Baby
• Hilary Swank 60 Minutes interview