Million Dollar Baby (PG-13)

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A Review By M. Chad Durham

Ostensibly Million Dollar Baby looks an awful lot like Rocky donning a sports bra. Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) is too poor, too feminine, and too old to succeed in the world of boxing. Rocky was too poor, too Italian, and too old to make it in the world of boxing. Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) is reluctant to train Maggie because she is too poor, too feminine, and too old to make it in the world of boxing. He sees female boxing as a carnival sideshow and, more to the point, he’s a bona fide misogynist embittered by the fact that he just lost his best fighter and, by extension, his last shot at training a champion. If you’ll recall, Mickey thought Rocky was too poor, too Italian, and too old to make it the world of boxing, but finally came to realize that Rocky was his last shot at training a champion.



Here’s where things start to differentiate: Scrap (Morgan Freeman), a one-eyed former boxer who lives in Frankie’s gym, intervenes. Whenever Maggie isn’t serving food and scraping plates as a waitress, she’s relentlessly pounding the punching bag day and night, desperate to capture Frankie’s attention because she knows she can become a champion with his help. Scrap begins to take a shine to Maggie, doing whatever he can to encourage Maggie and help Frankie see her potential. Once the two come together, the world of female boxing will never be the same; and neither will Maggie, Frankie, or Scrap.



So, Million Dollar Baby isn’t Rocky in a bra. It’s something much, much more. It’s Clint Eastwood’s finest achievement in filmmaking that transcends the sports genre. Eastwood’s use of shadow and light sets an interesting tone for the film that in a very real way equips the viewer to accept the story as it unfolds. He dares to take the audience in an unusual direction but does so with levity, tenderness, and aptitude.

Million Dollar Baby also happens to give us the finest performance of Eastwood’s long and distinguished acting career. Frankie Dunn is a complex man wracked by guilt, filled with doubt, and disappointed in life but somehow he still clings to a semblance of faith in God and man when he’s not antagonizing his favorite priest. Early in the film it seems like Freeman and Eastwood are just trying to out-rasp one another in a contest to see who can have the gruffer voice. However, as the story progresses, so does the depth and range that only veterans like these could pull-off. Freeman hasn’t had a part this good since The Shawshank Redemption.


The light-hearted banter between the three major characters seems genuine if only to serve as comic relief from the intensity of the plot. They flesh out some unforgettable roles as everything falls in place to offer up a powerful story that simply refuses to digress into cliché. Something profound happens to these people we come to love; they change in ways we only hope we could as they all discover what they’re really capable of doing for one another.



Hilary Swank is in top award-winning form. Maggie Fitzgerald isn’t just a female version of Rocky. She’s feisty, stubborn, and tough but sensitive and vulnerable around the edges. By the time we meet Maggie’s nasty family, we already know she comes from white trash but we also know she’s something special that can rise above the fray. The greatest fight Maggie Fitzgerald faces isn’t fought inside a ring against the champ, it’s fought outside the ring against her dreadful, ungrateful, and inconsiderate relatives.

Paul Haggis did an exceptional job adapting the screenplay from Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner, written by ex-cut man and boxing trainer Jerry Boyd, published under the pen name F.X. Toole. The anthology included a short story entitled “Million $$$ Baby” which is the basis for this film.

Perhaps the best movie of 2004, Million Dollar Baby is much darker than what you might expect from this genre, but most moviegoers should still come away with that warm fuzzy feeling only a good sports movie can provide. This is a HOT DATE and my pick to take the Oscar for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress of 2004.