The firm aesthetic distance that he takes from his subjects, pushing backĪbout as far as he can before losing the emotional threads, actually allows the films to be about things they wouldn't otherwiseīe about. This posture of Eastwood's is never purely stylistic. Willfully mundane framing device where the children of the protagonist haltingly consider everything that they, and we, are People she only tangentially knows? Who else would shift the point of view in Bridges onto the more reserved charactersimultaneouslyĪ shift away from Eastwood's own performanceand then interrupt the unfolding of torrid passion with an almost The maiming of a hooker and relegate her to near-silence and near-invisibility as the drama of avenging her pain transpires among The stories' swerves into pathos seem to encourage a purer sentimentalism. Maybe that's why Eastwood's camera and visual style, never exactly tentative (indeed, heĬould sometimes stand to be more tentative), are still a few paces removed from where you'd expect them to be, especially as Reabsorbed into the networks and conflicts they had formerly or unsuccessfully renounced, and the price to be paid for the renewal of group His storiessemi-retired gunmen, a foreign-born farmwife and her secret lover, semi-retired mafia men, semi-retired boxingĬoachesalready suggests the throat-catching melancholy that anchors these films. That Eastwood's movies tend to privilege outsiders as the central figures in
That inhabits and even typifies these milieus. River, and now here, Eastwood immerses himself in a regional milieu and a discrete, nearly encapsulated human community In Unforgiven, in The Bridges of Madison County, in Mystic Not crucially involved in the principal narrative, but not uninvolved either, heĮmbodies the strange kind of intimate, even plaintive detachment that has been the paradoxical tone of so many of Clint Eastwood'sįilms. Peripheral presence within the main action. Scrap provides our way into, through, and out of Million Dollar Baby, even though (or maybe because) he is a surprisingly Imply that what he isn't saying springs from a wisdom even more bruised and beaten than the maxims he shares with us, and withĪ specific audience within the film whose identity only gradually emerges. Lines in Freeman's face and the low tones in his voice, even lower in his voice-overs than in his dialogue scenes, constantly Himself was a force in the ring some decades ago, before a single, brutal contest cost him his career and his right eye. Thankfully, the actor's tremendous and by now familiar gifts forĬonveying gravity and an almost portentous reticence keep Scrap from being a colorful sidekick, a mooning commentator.Įven when his narration veers toward prolixity (and I am hardly one to argue with prolixity), Scrap knows more than he's saying about this sport which has shaped his lifehe Scrap is an unlikely mix of fatalism and an almost mystical optimism. "Anybody can lose one fight," Scrap intones, also on more than one occasion Īlong the same lines, but with broader implications, he tells us that when a contender is hopelessly cornered or dazed or overmatched byĪn opponent, "Sometimes there's just nothing you can do." Then again, "If there's magic in boxing, it's the magic of fightingīattles beyond endurance it's the magic of risking everything for a dream that nobody sees but you." As a character, Freeman's Or indeed the film's summary view of anything.
THE MOVIE MILLION DOLLAR BABY FULL
It is directly to the point of the movie that these diverse and frequentlyĭark homilies are all more or less true at the same time, though not one of them quite encompasses the film's full view of boxing, Scrap is full of aphorisms about boxing, whichĭon't contradict each other so much as they highlight different facets of the sport. "Boxing is an unnatural act." So we are instructed, more than once, by Scrap, the narrator and deceptively sage bystander playedīy Morgan Freeman in Clint Eastwood's boxing drama Million Dollar Baby. O'Byrne, Lucia Rijker, Margo Martindale, Riki Lindhome, Marcus Chait, Bruce MacVittie, Michael Peña. Cast: Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman, Jay Baruchel, Anthony Mackie, Mike Colter,īrian F. Top Ten List: #5 of 2004 (world premieres)Ĭlick Here for the Top 100 Films of the 00sĭirector: Clint Eastwood. Million Dollar Baby, in a first-round TKO December 21, 2004, at the Angelika Film Center in New York, NY