But at the end of the fight, he's still standing. This is not to say that Eastwood doesn't sometimes stumble with the occasional corny touch or false note.
It's an old-fashioned 15-rounder, a movie made by someone who plans to go the distance, allowing the material to do its job. “Million Dollar Baby” has no interest in the quick knockout. "Million Dollar Baby” exemplifies filmmaking at its most solid, the kind that results when a director knows what he wants and goes after it with an easy sense of purpose. Eastwood takes the opposite approach - he thinks that he can turn hokeyness into tragedy by pretending that the material isn't hokey, by dragging it out and drabbing it down. But usually those filmmakers do it by going so intensely into the emotions of the piece that (as in Dickens) what's sentimental becomes transcendent.
The movies are full of examples of directors who have transcended hokey material. Toole) tries to transcend its cornball overfamiliarity with the qualities that have long characterized Eastwood's direction - it's solemn, inflated and dull….īut it's the po-faced portentousness with which Eastwood presents the movie's ludicrous developments that seems to wow his admirers. Ty Burr, The Boston GlobeĪ compendium of every cliché from every bad boxing melodrama ever made, "Million Dollar Baby" (written by Paul Haggis from stories by F.X. More than " Unforgiven," more than "Mystic River," it is Clint Eastwood's autumnal masterpiece. It's a film that rejects the church for the parishioners, that walks away from God and toward people, and that unexpectedly ascends to a battered, anonymous grace. You may carry this movie with you for quite some time, turning over its unspoken meanings. "Million Dollar Baby" ultimately emerges into a cold light far from the bromides and consolations of Hollywood: What begins as a lark ends as a meditation on the costs of faith. Others may realize that the bleakness has shape and a purpose, and that it's more unyielding, more mature, than most American movies can begin to contemplate. Some in the audience will be lost for good, but that's the nature of risk. But he keeps going further and further, and slowly the wind fills the movie's sails again. I will say that for about 10 or 20 minutes you may be convinced that Eastwood has lost his mind, and that he has squandered the movie's smart, lusty vibe on the treacle of a tear-jerker. But with "Million Dollar Baby," Eastwood joins the rarefied ranks of the true cinema transcendentals Carl Theodor Dreyer, Yasujiro Ozu and Robert Bresson on the highest plane of directorial achievement. "Mystic River" out-Catholicized Scorsese and Coppola (and this one takes that several Hail Marys further). For my money, he's topped John Ford and Howard Hawks, our greatest Western auteurs, once or twice as well.
While the angels of death, damnation and frontier forgiveness have hovered over most of Eastwood's serious works, he has never made a more achingly spiritual movie than "Million Dollar Baby." In his development as a filmmaker, Eastwood long ago surpassed his great B movie mentors Don Siegel and Sergio Leone. Read Ebert’s full review of “Million Dollar Baby.”