Six dollar and fifty cent baby

I knew it was going to be a good movie-going experience when, at a theatre where I was carded going into The Life Aquatic, the zit-speckled sentry with the power to discount my ticket didn't even ask to see my ID when I told him I was a student. I don't actually have an ID anymore, and I was betting on just such a response. Poor kid's not going to last very long at Regal Cinemas.

Then again, sometimes Dame Fortune, she smiles on you.
I realized early on that my critical palate was soiled, that I wasn't able to tackle Million Dollar Baby with the singular focus the movie deserved. This is the trouble with seeing movies after the Oscar nominations have been announced. Rather than the simple rubric of what is good and what is bad about a given movie, I am preoccupied with specificities: did Clint Eastwood/Morgan Freeman/Hillary Swank deserve their respective nominations? Will they win?

These are essentially the same questions I ask anyway but, having some external benchmark, I also start to question my own opinions. What do these people--industry types, degrees of separation closer than I--see that I don't see? When the movie has been nominated for 7 academy awards, and almost all the big ones, the pressure is especially great.

I really hate that.

Adding to the discomfort, Million Dollar Baby is essentially two movies. The first is a formulaic tale of overcoming adversity. With a plucky protagonist, a surly mentor, a wizened old sidekick, and a handful of colorful side characters, the first hour-and-a-half you've seen a million times before. You've seen it in Rocky, you saw it in Mighty Ducks, Major League and even, you know, Top Gun. The first two acts are fun and heartwarming and wouldn't get nominated for anything. Morgan Freeman might squeak in as the one-eyed ex-boxer, but I don't think he'd win.

I was beside myself trying to figure out what Eastwood had done that was so fantastic, but I just couldn't get it. Maggie's journey is imbued with a powerful sense of destiny. The pacing is brisk, obstacles are overcome quickly. There's very little time for the characters to doubt themselves or their abilities. Maggie's ascent is as quick and sharp as her left hook. As an audience, we like her because she's so damned determined and so damned good. She's the LeBron James of women's welter weight boxing. She's not actually big enough to fight welter weight, but nobody her size will fight her, so she has to fight up several classes. Her character, like her record in the ring, in unimpeachable. She passes up chances for betterment to stay with her mentor. She is unmoved by the trappings of success. She uses her considerable winnings to help others while living in little more than a tenement. This imperviousness to the world and her forceful presence in the ring give the story a very beguiling and mythic feel.

Then the movie changes, becoming something totally different. The action climaxes with a force so unexpected that it knocked the wind out of me and sent the film spinning in completely new directions. There, on screen, something happened that made my jaw drop and my hand instinctively rise to cover it. I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my free arm around them like some damned child looking for solace. Somehow, this simple movie had managed something that no other movie has. It made me, in utter disbelief, gasp like my mom. Suddenly it is obvious that Eastwood and screen writer Paul Haggis have been playing us for suckers, this will not be a film of easy success or simple redemption.

Morgan Freeman's character, Scraps, narrates, and quickly we realize that only now, after shrieking like your high-strung mother the climax of action, can the real movie begin. That's the reason for the odd brevity: there's a more important story left to tell. Still, what becomes a rich and fulfilling emotional payoff would be blunted without a detailed inquest of both Maggie and Frankie's lives. Only in seeing her skyward ascent can we appreciate the finality of her circumstance, and only by seeing the man Frankie Dunn [Eastwood] is, can we understand why he must do what he, ultimately, does. So Scraps is in a tough place, with two very different but interdependent stories to tell, and he manages it admirably.

Eastwood's direction mimics Scraps' unadorned speech. The only conceit he allows himself are subtle homages to The Third Man. Simple sleights of lighting ensconce the characters in shadow, a trick he's used since The Bridges of Madison County. In shirking the gimmickry and gauzy sentimentality of many sports movies, Eastwood forces the weight of narrative onto the shoulders of the characters, who all give gorgeous, quiet performances.

By the end, Million Dollar Baby has become none of the things it pretended to be initially. Despite the divergence, the two ends eventually meet, and the movie never feels fractured or fake. Eastwood has told a story that is both a simple, rousing sports flick and something much more painful, real and, well, Oscar-worthy.