Reviewed By: Teri Tom
Watson Scale (0 being worst and 6 being perfect): 5.9
I suppose the genius of a film worthy of Oscar’s Best Picture award is that it can mean many things to many people. Or perhaps, many things to any single person.
The first time I saw MILLION DOLLAR BABY, I walked out of the theater thoroughly impressed on an artistic level. Dramatically, Squinty Clinty, Hilary, and Morgan are all brilliant. I immediately fell in love with the stripped down production and was completely enamored with Eastwood’s even more minimalist soundtrack. There are, like, three sublime nine-note themes that just keep repeating. Is there anything that Clint doesn’t do?
And Swank! I’ve read some articles where women boxers have given her somewhat backhanded compliments for her abilities, but that’s just sour grapes. Granted, it’s not real fighting, but, frankly, she moves a damn sight better than many so-called professionals I’ve seen. And you’re talking to the Fighting Mechanics Nazi here!
Still, on that first viewing, I wasn’t exactly sure I liked the message Baby was sending. This wasn’t, by the way, the now disgustingly politicized euthanasia issue. I didn’t even have the brain capacity to wrap my head around that one at the same time. Baby gives you a lot to think about. No, I had problems with the idea that if you are a woman—or anyone, for that matter—who dares to step out of bounds, then this—“this” meaning a disastrous ending—is what you can expect. Of course, historically, there have been plenty of people who pushed the societal envelope and indeed met disastrous endings. Score one for Baby. It rings true on that level.
I went back a second time purely for technical reasons. Sensing impending doom the first time around, I seemed to have spaced out during the climactic battle with the magnificent Lucia Rijker. There was, in fact, a woman out of Fort Wayne, Indiana, who, unable to withstand the film’s psychological trauma, actually PASSED OUT in the theater! But I digress. About that battle. It is terribly heavy-handed in both FX Toole’s book and in the film, and it is excruciatingly painful for me to see Lucia Rijker portray such a caricature of a villain. She is a lovely (though deadly) lady in real life (By the way, I highly recommend Katya Bankowsky’s 2002 documentary, SHADOWBOXERS, which spotlights Lucia’s career). The over-the-toppiness of this fight is also quite jarring and downright unpleasant given the beautiful understatement of the rest of the film.
But I digress again. The boxing blunder that Silman so spot-on attacks in his own Baby review is actually both well written and completely plausible in both the book and Paul Haggis’s script. Fighters hit each other after the bell all the time. In the film, however, the incident is grotesquely distorted, rendering it completely incomprehensible, especially to anyone who knows boxing. A slight tweaking in the editing room, or a mere delaying of the bell, would have made everything all right. I have been told that Clint’s explanation is that he wanted to remain true to the book. But if you’ve read the book—or the script, for that matter (which I have)—you’ll see that the way it’s put together in the film version is not even remotely true to either. I’d be happy to watch this sequence and debate this point with anyone, anytime. It is not only, as Silman says, an insult to boxing fans and the sport of boxing, but an insult to the intelligence of movie audiences as well.
It was near the end of this second viewing, however, that all was forgiven. The message so beautifully delivered by Morgan Freeman is the one that most strongly resonates with me: “People die everyday. Washing dishes. Mopping floors. And you know what their last thought is? I never got my shot.” And this is why—call me crazy—ultimately, I find the message of MILLION DOLLAR BABY to be an uplifting one.
If you really think about it, it doesn’t end particularly well for any of us. As the Jim Morrision biography says, “No one gets out of here alive.” It doesn’t necessarily matter how much time you’ve got. It’s what you do with that time. If you were to offer me the equivalent of being Johnny Marr on the Queen is Dead tour at the height of his powers, playing alongside Morrissey at the height of his powers, for one year and then that’s it/my number’s up/that or 50 years of Nothing Much, I’d grab my Gretsch in a heartbeat.
There’s no way around it. We eventually, whether that’s tomorrow or decades down the line, pay for the risks that we choose or choose not to take. And this is what puts MILLION DOLLAR BABY over the competition of other sports films like THE NATURAL or ROCKY or HOOSIERS. Of course, we’d all like to see a storybook ending once in awhile. And there are brief examples of those, too, in life. But then life goes on. Baby rings truer because the risks are real and there are consequences. Maybe it’s all a bit shocking and accelerated in a two-hour movie, but ask Muhammad Ali or any number of boxing veterans if there aren’t consequences. Upon publishing the short story collection that would become Million Dollar Baby, FX Toole (aka Jerry Boyd) said that he was just as interested in the “losers” in boxing as he was the winners. Just because you may risk…and lose…everything—in boxing, in love, in life—it doesn’t always mean that risk wasn’t worth taking.
On a final note, there has been a lot of ugly politicizing of this movie over the euthanasia issue, and those in the medical community are upset about the so-called legal and medical inaccuracies. To the latter, I’d simply say this misses the point. And to the former, I think Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times put it quite well: “I couldn’t help but imagine [Michael Medved] in Shakespearean England, tugging on people’s sleeves at the Globe Theatre, complaining that ‘Hamlet’ was simply a play that endorsed Oedipal urges.”
Yes, Million Dollar Baby is a lot of different things to different people. Political scapegoat. Anti-feminist vehicle. Tearjerker. Love story. Exercise motivator (Yes, really. Ask some of my clients). To me, it’s just a great film about the rewards and prices of taking chances…of living life and not sleepwalking through it.
Click if you would like to read SILMAN'S REVIEW of this film.
