Million Dollar Baby (Movie 2004): Cliched Clint Eastwood Melodrama

Million Dollar Baby movie with Hilary Swank: The most notable non-cliched narrative element in Clint Eastwood’s boxing-world-set, surrogate father-daughter melodrama is that its (nearly) invincible champ is a woman.

Million Dollar Baby (movie 2004) review: Even a splendid Hilary Swank can’t rescue Clint Eastwood’s contrived boxing melodrama

Fresh off the enthusiastically received, multiple Oscar-nominated, and appallingly insincere Mystic River, Best Director Academy Award winner Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven, 1992) has gone on to tackle the ups and downs of the boxing world in Million Dollar Baby.

Despite its cheery title and myriad boilerplate plot points, Eastwood’s latest isn’t one more Rocky-like rags-to-riches tale about a strong-willed underdog who’s transmogrified into an unbeatable topdog once he puts on his gloves, jumps into the boxing ring, and starts using other men as punching bags.

For starters, Million Dollar Baby’s lead character is a female boxer; besides, about two-thirds into the narrative, the movie takes a radical turn toward tragedy that is as unexpected as everything else on screen – whether before or after – is tediously predictable. For once the dust is settled, that last third quickly derails into the same sentimental mush Eastwood and screenwriter Paul Haggis had come up with earlier on.

Ultimately, the derivative, contrived, slow-moving Million Dollar Baby – which never quite makes up its mind whether boxing is an artful sport or a social disease – is made barely tolerable only by Hilary Swank’s performance as the steadfast titular fighter.

Predictable relationship

Chiefly based on a short story by F.X. Toole (pen name for boxing trainer Jerry Boyd), Million Dollar Baby provides the viewer with two movies for the price of one.

Ingmar Bergman-esque solemn tone or no, Part One, which encompasses the first two-thirds of the film, presents the all-too-familiar account of the pursuit of the American Dream – or perhaps more accurately, the escape from the American Nightmare – in the face of tremendous odds: Poor, fatherless Southern waitress Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) is eager to leave behind her trailer-trash background by punching her way to boxing-ring stardom. (See fatherless, fast-rising champ John Garfield in Body and Soul and troubled but tough slugger Michelle Rodriguez in Girlfight.)

To get there, Maggie begs reluctant veteran coach Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) to become her guide and mentor. Frankie is a stoic man (good luck in finding an emotional Clint Eastwood hero) who, much to the dismay of the local priest (Brían F. O’Byrne), doesn’t quite grasp the concept of the Holy Trinity, and for years has been, for never explained reasons, estranged from his never-seen daughter.

No points for those who guess that Frankie not only ends up coaching Maggie but that he also becomes her surrogate father figure. Or for those who guess that the fiercely loyal Maggie becomes an even fiercer fighter.

Million Dollar Baby movie with Clint Eastwood and Hilary Swank: In 1999, Swank took on a more radical “manly” role – as a butch lesbian trying to pass for a guy – in Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry, which earned her that year’s Best Actress Oscar.

The Champ meets The English Patient

In Million Dollar Baby’s third act, we’re taken into The Champ meets The English Patient territory.

As mentioned further up, that comes as a shock because everything else that had happened until then had zealously followed the path of every feel-good American sports/competition movie of past and present, from Brown of Harvard, One in a Million, Gentleman Jim, and Somebody Up There Likes Me to the dreary Rocky franchise, Breaking Away, Hoosiers, and Seabiscuit.

In the case of Million Dollar Baby, the tragic incident that destroys everyone’s happiness is the result of an injury that takes place during a match. (See Wallace Beery/Jon Voight in The Champ.) Needless to say, wholesome, go-getting, all-American Maggie doesn’t actually lose that particular fight; her butch, mean-spirited, foreign opponent (an ex-prostitute!) cheats.

As our now-tetraplegic heroine lies paralyzed in bed, it becomes obvious that sooner or later she will ask to be relieved of her suffering. When the inevitable moment arrives, the avid churchgoing Frankie must decide whether he will help to terminate the life of the young woman he has grown to love as a daughter. (See devoted nurse Juliette Binoche in The English Patient and, going all the way back to 1927, loving son/doctor Nils Asther in Sorrell and Son.)

Once again, no points for those who guess Frankie’s eventual choice.

Derivative punches

In order to make Million Dollar Baby’s storyline feel fresh, Clint Eastwood and Paul Haggis needed to add deeper layers to their characters and situations (check out Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers), whether or not they were also found in the source material. Instead, the filmmakers opted for hoary clichés that date back to cinema’s infancy.

Besides Maggie’s meteoric rise as a fighter and her bond with Frankie, among the movie’s countless by-the-book developments are the dime-store philosophical narration provided by a listless Morgan Freeman as Frankie’s boxing club pal, and, worst of all, the filmmakers’ decision to avoid presenting good guys who carry within them dark shades of gray and bad guys who are more than selfishness and/or cowardice incarnate.

Due to Eastwood’s and Haggis’ near-absolute pitch-black/shiny-white presentation of their characters, most of the acting in Million Dollar Baby feels either hammy or banal. Case in point, Maggie’s trashiest-of-the-trash family, which comes across as a living advertisement for the end of all government assistance to the poor. (The fact that the director is an avowed Republican is likely no coincidence here.)

And let’s not even get into Jay Baruchel’s unhinged wannabe boxer, who is allowed to throw off-balance every scene he’s in.

Taciturn Clint Eastwood

Now, we’re aware that Clint Eastwood’s raspy-voiced “good guy” must have done something vile to his estranged daughter. But we’re never told what that was lest he lose our sympathy.

Frankie, in fact, is nothing more than your usual taciturn, don’t-fuck-with-him movie hero that dates all the way back to William S. Hart’s cowboys of the 1910s. (Though in all fairness to Hart, his somewhat sinister “good badmen” were more complex creations.)

Looking tired – all those Spaghetti Westerns and violent, fascist-hued cop flicks will take a toll on anyone – the 74-year-old actor-director merely goes through the motions. Indeed, both he and Morgan Freeman underplay to the point that at times it was hard to tell whether those guys were still breathing.

Eastwood’s sole effective moment comes in a brief sequence at the hospital, when Frankie’s tenderness toward Maggie feels genuine.

Million Dollar Baby movie with Hilary Swank: In addition to her Oscar win, Swank was also named Best Actress by the Screen Actors Guild, the Golden Globes (Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama), and the National Society of Film Critics.

Superlative Hilary Swank

And that’s why Million Dollar Baby wholly belongs to Best Actress Academy Award winner Hilary Swank (Boys Don’t Cry, 1999), who, once again playing a girl doing “a man’s job,” immerses herself in a role with “Oscar” written all over it.

As proof of Swank’s charisma, this viewer stayed with her through every contrived plot twist and turn, as she ran the gamut from brave one-round fighter to even braver hospital-bed heroine – the latter not unlike Javier Bardem in another 2004 right-to-die movie that became a critical and commercial hit, Alejandro Amenábar’s slick The Sea Inside.

Too busy punching bags and people to find time for sexual distractions with either boys or girls, Maggie is as unrealistically fearless as she is sexless. Yet Swank’s puppy-dog eagerness is appealing, and in spite of great odds – the script, not the character’s poverty or family background – she brings such warmth to her role that Maggie becomes one outlandishly tough fighter that is impossible to resist.

Top of the game?

If only Clint Eastwood and Paul Haggis had been as gutsy in their depiction of the boxing world. Their wishy-washiness, in fact, is one of the film’s most damning flaws, for Million Dollar Baby offers much philosophical talk about boxing without ever taking a solid stance on the topic.

For instance, Morgan Freeman’s narrator calls it “unnatural” at one point – but because of the way boxers move, not because the activity consists of human beings brutalizing one another to the delight of greedy bettors and bloodthirsty audiences.

In addition, no one bothers to question Maggie’s belief that she must use her fists to improve her social and emotional condition, whereas any Hollywood movie would have moralized had that same disadvantaged woman felt like using other body parts to get ahead.

Sure, we do see some of the ugly fight wounds in close-up and Eastwood (and his sound editors) make the punches reverberate like bone-breaking cannon explosions à la Raging Bull. Yet our heroine is a heroine because of what she does in the ring; Maggie’s honesty, loyalty, and drive matter – to her surrogate father, to the audience – only because her fists make her a success.

She ends up a tetraplegic, of course, but as Freeman’s sleepy narrator reminds us, she has also been at the top of her game, which is more than most people could ever say about their own achievements. No doubt it was all worth it.

Or perhaps it wasn’t.

Million Dollar Baby (movie 2004) cast & crew

Director: Clint Eastwood.

Screenplay: Paul Haggis.
Mostly from “Million $$$ Baby,” one of six short stories found in F.X. Toole’s Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner.

Cast: Clint Eastwood. Hilary Swank. Morgan Freeman. Jay Baruchel. Brían F. O’Byrne. Mike Colter. Margo Martindale. Michael Peña. Anthony Mackie. Lucia Rijker.

“Million Dollar Baby (Movie 2004)” notes

More awards

Among its numerous other awards season wins, Million Dollar Baby earned Clint Eastwood the Directors Guild and the New York Film Critics awards for Best Director, in addition to the French Academy’s Prix César and the Italian Academy’s David di Donatello for Best Foreign Film.

In addition, multitasker Eastwood received a special mention from the National Board of Review.

And Hilary Swank was the year’s Best Actress according to movie critics in Boston, Florida, and Phoenix.

Clint Eastwood and Hilary Swank Million Dollar Baby movie images: Warner Bros.

“Million Dollar Baby (Movie 2004): Cliched Clint Eastwood Melodrama” last updated in April 2023.