Just like Frankie Dunn’s gym is not a gym so much as a battleground for letting one’s guard down (I know that’s not what boxing gyms are usually known for). The diner might as well be called dignity. The diner that Frankie goes to and has heavenly pie in-that’s not really a diner.
And we see these minds made manifest, like W.S. But more than that it takes place in the mind. In order to pull this off, Eastwood had to create a world all unto itself. And when Swank’s Maggie visits her family and they treat her like trash-then we see what she’s really up against. There are bookies, hoods, ghosts, ghoulish gamblers. Not just the crooked fighters in the ring. But as Freeman says, upon hearing of a tough bout refusal by Frankie, “You just protected yourself out of a championship!”Īre you brave? Are you susceptible? Are you always in control? Can you surrender, let go? Will you risk impairment for love? Take on menace to express your truth? In Million Dollar Baby there are monsters and demons everywhere. “Protect yourself at all times,” Clint’s Frankie repeats again and again to his fighters-the way only a wounded, cautious man would. Every little moment is about this one thing. Don’t expose yourself-you might get marred. Can’t stand that Freeman’s toes are exposed. Do you shelter yourself? Will you risk your neck? Will you die? Morgan Freeman has holes in his socks. But I don’t think I ever saw one as relentless as Million Dollar Baby. There are are plenty of great movies about this stuff. Or people who are willing to get hurt to reach for a goal, take that chance. Or people who did get hurt and are protecting themselves from getting hurt again. And while that book is a great collection of short stories, the credit has to go mostly to Haggis and Eastwood for lassoing it all together into metaphor. The script was adapted from boxing trainer/writer F.X. It starts to wear you down without you even knowing what’s happening.
MILLION DOLLAR BABY SONGS MOVIE
But the movie just starts to work on you. And you don’t notice this consciously, because Clint is so good. What takes it up to the exceptional rank is that every scene is packed with levels of symbols. It’s the desert without lions, orange juice without pulp. Go see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and you get the idea. She might tell you about the blood issuing from her cut thumb to the running of a million soldiers, “redcoats, every one.”Ī movie with no metaphor is just a plot where characters do a bunch of shit and then just please run the fucking end credits so I can leave. You get cut? Ask Sylvia Plath about that. And when you get punched in the face, in the ring, you’re battling storm clouds, ex-lovers, depression, heartbreak, genetics. The world itself is a physical expression of our collective dream. What we’re living is metaphor.” Our bodies are representations of the universe, each body telling us a little different information about the galaxy. Merwin: “We live the shadow of our lives. And the studios don’t really bother with Goldman or Schrader, so… Only old lions like Bill Goldman and Paul Schrader bother with metaphor anymore.
The studio movies are just trailers now-we all know that. The new studio films-there’s too many test screenings for anything to be made other than a sad pitch stretched out over 120 minutes. There may be political undertones, but that’s as far as it goes. What happened to metaphorical writing? Mumblecore and Neo-neo realism movies don’t bother with it because they’re too concerned with the flatness and ordinariness of everyday reality. There are like, actual symbols and themes. Unlike a lot of movies, we are not just watching a story unfold scene by scene. But what makes Baby, I feel, a total masterpiece, is that it’s all glued together by blazingly clear and subtle metaphorical writing and directing. And then when it does go tragic, maybe you’re thinking Brian’s Song or Bang The Drum Slowly. It’s a terrifically disguised movie because you think you’re getting the female Rocky. It’s been over five years since Baby came out and as the years pass I think it’s making a pretty decent case for itself as the greatest American film of the last twenty-five years. And shit, if that ain’t enough, ol’ Morgan Freeman himself narrates the proceedings.
There’s a grouchy priest who says wise, grouchy things. The screenwriter was a long time Scientologist and bequeathed on us the atrocity called Crash. I know a lot of people don’t think much of Million Dollar Baby.