SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot.
‘It isn’t really a boxing story,’ Clint Eastwood has remarked about his new film. But then, when are boxing films ever just about the noble art? Body and Soul (1947), Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and Raging Bull (1980) – they’re all works of social commentary more or less bound up with issues of masculinity. And so is this, in its way. One of the best scenes in the film is when Eastwood’s veteran trainer Frankie goes with Maggie, the young female boxer he reluctantly takes under his wing, back to the Ozarks to meet her family. We expect to meet the salt of the earth, poor but proud people who have made Maggie the person she is. Instead, we encounter her blowsy, sour-faced mother and sluttish sister, whose sole response to Maggie’s gift of a house is to worry how it might affect their welfare payments. Poverty hasn’t given these people hearts of gold, it’s made them mean-spirited and grasping.
In a sense the movie is the American dream over again, with its tale of how boxing can offer a route out of a life spent in a place between nowhere and goodbye, as Maggie’s home town is described. The twist is that Maggie is trying to make it in a sport all of whose traditions are aggressively masculine. Yet in the end not too much is made of that. Maggie has none of the amatory entanglements of the usual Hollywood heroine that might conflict with boxing, and is possessed of a burning ambition and physical resilience which render her adaptation to the boxing world unproblematic.
But boxing movies almost always end in tragedy, as if the brutality of the sport is a kind of metaphor for the harshness of life itself. Maggie gets her nose broken early on (Frankie sets it in the ring, making an audible click that had some viewers at the press show squirming in their seats). Yet nothing prepares us for the shock of her paralysing injury and its aftermath. One might think the scene is set for something like The Wings of Eagles (1956), where John Wayne heroically forces himself to overcome a similar disability. Rather, Maggie’s swift descent into despair offers no final uplift, but the bleakest ending of any Eastwood picture.
Though in Hilary Swank’s spirited performance Maggie is more than a cipher, it’s Frankie who is at the centre of the picture. Two things rule his life: the estrangement of his daughter (never explained), for whom Maggie is an obvious – perhaps too obvious – substitute. And his guilt over the loss of an eye by Scrap in a fight that Frankie ought to have stopped. Scrap (a marvellously grizzled performance by Morgan Freeman) is Frankie’s amanuensis, a relationship full of bickering and unstated affection, like an elderly married couple. This guilt prevents Frankie, brilliant trainer though he is, from pushing his boxers forward into difficult fights in which they might gain championships but sustain injury. ‘Protect yourself’ is Frankie’s first law of boxing technique, and it’s a lesson he has applied to himself. Maggie’s enthusiasm and talent, together with his fatherly feelings for her, eventually persuade him to overcome his anxieties, with disastrous results.
The washed-out colour photography, the seedy urban locations, the peripheral low-life characters all give the film a pleasingly noir feel. And in film noir style the story is narrated in voiceover by Scrap, allowing for a series of pithy statements of hard-boiled philosophy. ‘Boxing’s about respect,’ Scrap intones, ‘getting it for yourself and taking it away from the other guy.’ As often in the movies, the hard-boiled carapace conceals a world-view just short of sentimentality, as Maggie is cocooned in the cosy family atmosphere of the gym. It’s this which is torn apart by Maggie’s fate and an ending that refuses any solace for the viewer. In a running gag throughout the film, Frankie goes every day to Mass, apparently seeking absolution for whatever sin drove his daughter away. But a vein of subversive humour keeps surfacing as he grills the priest on abstruse points of doctrine, with such persistence that the priest is provoked into calling him ‘a fucking pagan’. When at the end Frankie asks for guidance on Maggie’s request for euthanasia, the priest refuses to allow such an act. Frankie has failed to protect himself against getting involved; now he’s out on his own.
Edward Buscombe, Sight and Sound, March 2005
Clint Eastwood interviewed
You don’t appear to feel constrained by genre. You’re not afraid to break rules, yet you’re not flashy about it. Do you feel different from most of today’s directors?
I don’t think about that; I hate to get into looking inwards because that means I’m not looking outwards. But it’s true I’m probably more influenced by that older tradition when people made a greater variety of films. Nowadays so many decisions about making films are about what’s just been out there – the fad of the moment.
To get Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby made I had to go with hat in hand. Nobody wanted to make them. I took Mystic River to people I knew, but even Warner Bros. said, ‘It’s so dark.’ Next I went to them with Million Dollar Baby. ‘It’s about a woman in boxing! Nobody’ll want to see that!’ So I went to Universal and they said, ‘We’ve already got a boxing movie.’ I said, ‘It’s not a boxing movie, that’s just the world it’s set in. There’s more to it than that; it’s a father-daughter love story.’ Then Warner Bros. came back and said, ‘We don’t want you to make this anywhere else, but could you make it on a really austere budget?’ So I told them it wouldn’t be expensive, and I’d do it like Play Misty for Me for no money: they’d pay me a percentage if it made money, and if it didn’t, that was fine by me. Same deal as 38 years ago. Anyway, it started slowly and went on to do very well, so we were right on that occasion. We could just as easily have been wrong, I suppose, but at least we’re not making a picture because it’s part of a trend or because another studio’s making something similar across town. That shouldn’t be important. You should make what you want to do. When we made Unforgiven it was a quiet period for Westerns, but I said, ‘It’s a special story, it’ll have its own character.’ You have to go with what you believe in.
Interview by Geoff Andrew, Sight and Sound, September 2008
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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