Million Dollar Baby
I finally watched Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood's tour de force from 2004. I know I'm so late as to be mostly irrelevant when it comes to commenting on these things, but as a matter of practice, I thought I'd throw my two cents in.
I confess I brought a bias into watching the film that wasn't good, and as a result, spoiled the experience for myself. I'm not a huge Clint Eastwood fan (though I loved Unforgiven), and knowing where the film was going (which wasn't true for so many who saw the film when it first came out), I was in a foul mood from the beginning. (NOTE: if you haven't seen the film, you might want to stop reading this, because I'm going to talk about the end of the film, or as they say in film reviews, SPOILERS AHEAD.) Clint Eastwood's face is an amazing presence on screen, but his acting does little for me. Hillary Swank, on the other hand, was superb, as was Morgan Freeman's gorgeous narrative score.
The set-up has tons of promise. Estranged fathers and daughters, the plucky waitress from trailer trash America determined to fight her way (literally, she's a boxer) to her own life, the noble, toilet-cleaning servant who takes in plucky waitress, creating the bridge to the guilt-laden trainer/cut man who will be her path to both glory and suffering. With all that suffering going on, the film is either going to become a redemption film, or it's going to be just mean and leave these people where they are. Well, if it did the latter, nobody would have bothered with it. So redemption it is.
The problem is that the redemption of Frankie (Eastwood's character), guilty of some unknown sin against his daughter, so terrible that she returns his weekly letters unopened, labeled "return to sender," follows the path of reconnection and engagement in the first two-thirds of the film, Frankie taking on Swank's character Maggie as a sort of stand-in daughter. But then, just as things reach the pinnacle of sports-movie glory, the title fight, the tale takes a sharp, gut-punching left, leading Frankie--and us--toward a horrific choice, a choice we don't want to face, yet one that will inevitably show itself (in fiction and in real life) as medicine becomes more and more able to extend our lives. Frankie can't do what Maggie asks of him (end her suffering), yet--with some rather inept help from a callous priest--comes to understand that in the end, the most compassionate thing--read loving--he can do is fulfill her wish to end her life.
So he kills her.
And with that compact statement, I make an act done in compassion seem criminal (I asked my wife, "Can't he get arrested for that?"), and anybody with a thread of feeling will react with force, accusing me of reducing a complex human reality to some kind of ideological stance that smacks of callousness, perhaps so much so that to have not assisted Maggie's suicide would have amounted to a sort of hate crime.
So I retract the statement. He doesn't kill her, not in the manner those words seem to intend. He helps her end her life, which is just what she wanted, and of course, understandable given her character, her journey, and her choices.
But the problem is that the world of the film is a world where God either doesn't exist, doesn't care, or worse, is totally inept, and in which human beings are really no different than dogs when you really come down to it. In fact, Maggie's request is couched in exactly those terms. "At least treat me with as much dignity as you would the dog that needs to be put down" is what she seems to say, (referencing an earlier story about just such a compassionate act). That's assuming that the dignity of the dog (and yes, I believe they have dignity) is the same as the dignity of the human being.
Frankly, I believe humans have more.
Can I conceive of situations where a human being might take the life of another out of compassion? Push come to shove, maybe. Given the messiness of life under the sun, reluctantly, kicking and screaming, maybe.
But it's not this one.
Read Jeffrey Overstreet's review. He says all this much better than I can...
3:52:09 PM
