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copyright ©1999-2005
DigsMagazine.com.
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Plot synopsis
Frankie Dunn's trained a lot of boxing champions in his long career, but
when eager new boxer Maggie Fitzgerald approaches him to ask for help,
he turns her down. He doesn't train girls, he tells her, letting her
know in no uncertain terms that though he realizes female boxing has
become popular, he doesn't think women have any place in such a brutal
sport and that anyway, Maggie's far too old. But thirty-one-year-old
Maggie's spent her whole life thus far used to the fact that world
doesn't expect much of her; boxing's the only thing she's ever done
that's made her feel like she's worth something, and she's not about to
give up so easily. She becomes a member of the gym Frankie runs with his
friend (and former star boxer) Eddie, putting in hour after hour alone
at the punching bag, occasionally getting tips from Eddie, who sees both
her determination and her potential. Frankie does his best to ignore
her, but in the end, he can't stand watching her go about it all wrong.
He reluctantly takes her on, though he makes her promise that as soon as
he's taught her what she needs to know, she'll find someone else to be
her manager. This is Frankie's way of insuring he doesn't get too
attached; he's had boxers ditch him in the past, and is no stranger to
abandonment in his private life either, having tried and failed for
years to get in contact with his estranged daughter. But as Frankie
helps Maggie gain the skills and hone the instincts to become a
world-class boxer, attachment happens anyway. Both the old man and the
young woman begin to discover that in each other, they've found family.
It's a relationship that will cause them pain and bring them comfort, as
they find themselves facing a very difficult battle.
Review
I swear I'm like the one person in America who's never seen Rocky.
Frankly, this has never seemed like a major loss in my life; boxing, on
the whole, doesn't really do a whole lot for me. So when I first saw the
previews for Million Dollar Baby, I wasn't particularly
interested. I like movies about complex people and complicated emotions
and hard-to-wrestle-with ideas; feel-good flicks of the
underdog-becomes-a-champion genre? Eh, not my thing, even if the
underdog is an appealingly feisty girl fighting annoying gender
stereotypes. But then Million Dollar Baby went on to garner
awards galore, and so I added it to my DVD rental list even though it
still didn't sound like it would be my cup o' tea. As it turns out, Million
Dollar Baby kind of is my sort of a movie -- the boxing ring
might be the setting for a good chunk of the movie's scenes, but this is
very definitely a relationship movie. The main point of the movie isn't
about how Maggie rises to become a boxing success; the movie's far more
interested in exploring what makes its two lonely protagonists tick, and
how their makeshift father-daughter relationship develops. As such, it's
the excellent and completely non-melodramatic performances of the two
stars that really make the movie work. Both Swank and Eastwood give
their characters just the right balance of toughness and vulnerability
to feel real -- we can't help but like them and feel for them and root
for them. There's something that feels kind of old-fashioned about this
simple story -- no hip camera angles, no trendy convoluted story
structures, heck, even the look of the movie kind of makes you feel like
it's set in some earlier era. This is a quiet movie, a contemplative
movie, a poignant movie; there's nothing flashy about it and yes, some
folks might think it makes the movie a tad obvious, a bit boring. But in
the end, Million Dollar Baby does what good movies ought to: it
makes us think, it makes us feel, it touches our hearts and our minds
both. —reviewed
by Yee-Fan Sun
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