Million-dollar heavy

By Noel Vera

It's the best-picture Oscar winner of 2004, and it's easy to see
why: plodding, self-important, sentimental, it's just the kind of
movie Academy members love to vote for.

Clint Eastwood's a classic case of the celebrity star who wants the
respect of critics, and will work for years to earn it. In revenge
flicks like "The Outlaw Josey Wales" and "Pale Rider," he showed us
what he learned from genuine filmmakers like Don Seigel and Sergio
Leone, borrowing their camera moves and lighting (in the case of
Seigel, even his favorite cinematographer, Bruce 'Prince of
Darkness' Surtees), only slowing it down some for that
crucial 'important picture' feel. In "White Hunter, Black Heart" he
showed he can be critical of the male machismo (he just can't act
the part of John Huston, is all). In "Unforgiven"--a key work, I
believe--scriptwriter David Peoples taught Eastwood that a
screenplay with enough 'heart' (read: easy sentimentality) can earn
that elusive golden doorstop. With "Mystic River" and this latest,
Eastwood demonstrates the depth and breadth of his hard-earned
knowledge--not so much of filmmaking, but of what makes the Oscar
voter tick (or vote)--and panders accordingly.

You see it all over the movie: Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), a
flat-footed waitress waiting to be transformed into a fluid boxing
pro, just has to flash her wide-lipped smile and the audience falls
for her, right off the bat; they can't help but respond to her youth
(relatively speaking; at over thirty years of age she's too old to
take up the sport), her spirit, her huge heart (Swank's own
unflappable persona goes a long way to selling this saintly plaster
figurine). Add two crotchety-yet-kindly old men as her guardian
angels and you have a sexless "My Fair Lady," with Frankie Dunn
(Eastwood) as an unfunny Henry Higgins-type coach ("girlie, tough
ain't enough" being about as witty as the man gets), and
Eddie 'Scrap Iron' Dupris (Morgan Freeman) as a depressed--and
depressing--Henry Pickering type (poor Freeman's also saddled with
the movie's endlessly tiresome voiceover narration).

It's all so simple and, when you stop to think about it, so flat-
footed. You're supposed to root for Swank and Eastwood and Freeman,
and hiss at practically everyone else: Earline Fitzgerald, Swank's
white-trash mother (Margo Martindale) and Mardell, her slatternly
sister (Riki Lindhome); the sleazy boxing agent who had previously
stolen Frankie's rising-star boxer; Billie 'The Blue Bear' (Lucia
Rijker), the former East German prostitute who makes a Darth Vader
entrance (she isn't just Teutonic, she has to be a whore, to boot)--
all this set in the grit and squalor of the women's boxing ring. It
ought to be a rule of thumb, if not an actual law, that when the
picture's lighting scheme (by Tom Stern, channeling Surtees) is more
complexly shaded and ambiguous than the characters, alarm bells go
off in your head.

And it isn't just the extremely broad strokes; Eastwood is as crude
and simplistic with the details (skip the rest of this paragraph if
you plan to see the movie). Maggie's rise up the ranks of women
boxers is remarkably free of game-fixing and corrupt organizers
(aside from the actual grime on the walls and floors of the sets,
it's one of the cleanest boxing pictures I know); Maggie herself
encounters a series of klutzes who politely drop to the canvas the
moment she taps their jaws--none of them showing any of Maggie's
drive, none employing even a hint of a dirty trick (when someone
actually does, you can be sure the outcome will be different). When
Maggie finally faces Billie 'The Blue Bear,' she's woefully
unprepared--she has no idea how to counter Billie's elbow blows, nor
does she keep a careful eye on Billie even when the bell is rung
(this despite Frankie giving her a video of Billie's previous fights
to study). When Maggie's completely paralyzed she asks Frankie to
pull the plug on her when, as Arthur Caplan of the Center for
Bioethics points out, the proper person to ask would be the doctor
or nurses (who really can't refuse a direct request from a
reasonably sane patient not to kill her, but to allow her to die).
When Frankie does grant her request, it's in the most idiotic way
possible: he sneaks into the hospital (Which have the darkest-
looking corridors I've ever seen--haven't they been paying their
light bills?), takes out a vial of adrenaline (Where did he get that-
-from a drugstore?), injects her with it, removes the respirator
tube, and leaves. No investigation of the unattached respirator, or
the abnormal levels of adrenalin in Maggie's blood (an air bubble
would have been easier to inject, be more undetectable, and be at
least as painless (Maggie can't feel anything from the neck down).
Frankie's not arrested or even questioned about her death.

Nit-picking points, perhaps--but the accumulated mass of them, plus
the cartoonish manner in which everyone who is not Eastwood,
Freeman, or Swank is portrayed (and even they aren't as rounded or
well-thought out as they could be), betrays a willingness to stack
the deck, to go after your tear ducts, even at the cost of
credibility.

As critic David Walsh points out in his article " The absence of
democratic sensibility in American filmmaking" (World Socialist Web
Site, 1/22/05), this kind of simplistic characterization is nowhere
more blatant than in the portrayal of Maggie's mother and sister--
who aren't just ungrateful or insensitive, but too plain dumb to
realize that a house free and clear on hand represents more ready
money than a whole stack of checks in the welfare office. I don't
mind, as Walsh does, the portrayal of 'poor white trash' as being
less than saintly, much--they're people as flawed as we are, of
course--but if your lower-class villains can't display much
imagination or initiative or even intelligence in their villainy
(the painfully ham-handed attempt to have Maggie sign over her
estate doesn't really count), then you're not being fair to the
characters, as characters, at all.

"Million Dollar Baby" isn't a bad movie, exactly--it's well-acted
(by Swank and Freeman, mostly; Eastwood mugs and drips a bit of
mucus but is otherwise as wooden as when he did the Dirty Harry
pictures), nicely photographed and scored, and tasteful all around.
It just doesn't hold together, is all--the particulars don't quite
mesh, as a result of which the characters don't come to life, as a
result of which one's belief in and sympathy for them falters, as a
result of which the rather strained and contorted attempt at tragedy
falls short of moving the viewer (though Swank comes close, despite
everything). As architect Le Corbusier once put it, god (or the
devil, or art) is in the details.

(First published in Businessworld, March 4, 2005)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)