To all those who bemoan Clint Eastwood's decision to "get in touch with his feminine side" (as it was put at an Oscars party I recently had the pleasure of attending): sorry, but strike up another victory for the vagina-era. To all those who don't take film-watching as a quantifier of their testosterone-levels (besides, didn't all the greatest indulgences of square-jawed masculinity [Hawks, Hemingway, etc.] ultimately frame it as a tenuous aspiration, rather than brute fact?): rejoice, for Mr Eastwood has returned, bringing with him that haggard, glory-horse level of craftsmanship that remains just about all but lost today.

Without a doubt, Million Dollar Baby reads like the work of not only a veteran, but, more specifically, someone who has grown up inside the system: it harkens back to an archaic, early studio-era form of filmmaking, yet carries it through with such a galvanizing sense of integrity that it ends up transcending its own triteness. Where as Mystic River saw Clint taking a God's-eye view of a working-class community in Boston, his decision to act as Frankie in Million Dollar Baby gives his age a more obviously tactile dimension: cast alongside Morgan Freeman, their bodies are an ever-present reminder of time's passing, and, often left buoyed in thick swathes of shadow, hang with a kind of towering magnificence. But they also carry with them the unspoken scarrings of longing and regret, left to pickle in the stale air of a gym that feels like a world unto itself (its various horizontals swarming the 2:35 frame). When their all-boy fisting party is finally crashed by a girl, Maggie (Hillary Swank), requesting to be trained, Frankie runs the usual gauntlet from
steadfast dismissal to wearied acceptance; why it works then is because of the way Eastwood strips everything down to a bare essential, until boxing becomes life and life becomes boxing, until you're left with characters faltering to let one another into their
highly-specific universes.

The first 2/3 continue in this tight-fisted underdog-achieves-success manner, only with a heightened sense of class awareness, where the ring becomes an arena for Maggie's self-definition and means of escaping her self-proclaimed status as "trash." There is also the dim flicker of a father/daughter bond, one that bends with the sickly hue of not a moral-crisis but a moral-apocalypse, following the third act Twist, where Maggie's success is derailed with such velocity that it's like a stream of carriages piling up against one another. If Eastwood's ouevre is indeed about redemption, then Million Dollar Baby raises the possibility by asking a man to paradoxically destroy that which he has created.—David Levinson

» Clint Eastwood | USA | 2004