Million Dollar Baby (Two-Disc Widescreen Edition)
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Actor: Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Joe D'Angerio, Morgan Eastwood, Morgan FreemanBrand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.40:1
Running Time: 132 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-07-12
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Warner Home Video
DVD Reviews of Million Dollar Baby (Two-Disc Widescreen Edition)
DVD Review: A Moving Film with great Bonus Features
Summary: 5 Stars
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS. IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE FILM, DO NOT, REPEAT, DO NOT READ THIS REVIEW. THE PURPOSE OF THIS REVIEW IS TO HELP PEOPLE DECIDE IF THEY WANT TO PURCHASE THE DVD, OR SEE THE FILM AGAIN.
By Alfred Hitchcock's standards (very high standards indeed), Clint Eastwood turns in a superb performance in "Million Dollar Baby." Hitchcock used to say that a great film actor is someone "who can do nothing, very well."
When a letter arrives at home for Frankie (Eastwood), he shows, without doing much, that it is bad news. He picks up this letter with some trepidation, enters his home, opens a closet, and takes down a box. We see that the box is full of letters.
The narrator (Freeman) tells us that all these letters have come back, unopened, from Frankie's daughter, that all are marked "Return to Sender" or "Addressee Unknown." Clearly, she is ignoring him. Eastwood shows his pain, with few facial expressions, by the way he handles the box, and how he places the letter in it -- all without a word.
It is moving scene, but one wonders why director Eastwood places the letter into the middle of the box, rather than at the back or front. Surely this is the latest letter. To me, it would make more sense to put the latest letter before the others, or after them. See it once, you'll never notice. But see it again, and you will notice.
Frankie is a daily church-goer. This may seem unusual, but was written into the script after the screen writer met the author of the short story on which the film is based, F.X. Toole, and discovered that the late F.X. Toole attended church daily.
The priest regularly asks Frankie if he writes to his daughter. He says, "Yes," or "Every Week." Then Frankie usually tries the young, and callow, priest's patience. The priest, by the way, is a character actor who does nothing, but not very well.
Scrap (Freeman) surreptitiously coaches Maggie (Swank) to hit the heavy bag while it is moving away from her, to imagine it is a man, to think of how to keep her balance while making her opponent lose hers. Less than twenty seconds later Maggie hits the bag while it is swinging toward her.
Later, Scrap tells Maggie that Frankie has never said anything about wanting to stop Scrap's last fight in order to save Scrap's eye. Scrap says he just knows this. Less than twenty minutes before, Frankie as expressed to Scrap, the deepest remorse for not stopping Scrap's last fight in order to save his eye.
SPOLER ALERT!!
The scenes Maggie plays as a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down, go on too long. They undermine the considerable empathy Maggie has built with the audience to that point. The few moments in a montage showing Frankie, waiting patiently, reading silently to himself, hovering at Maggie's bedside late into the night, evoke much more than those longer scenes in which Maggie tries to commit suicide by biting her tongue and almost bleeds to death, in which her family coaxes her to make her mark on a contract in which she gives up her rights and her money to them, in which we are shown her bed sores, or the gangrene on her leg, and those scenes in which she just lies there and trades hushed, moderately well-written dialog with Frankie. Much of this material, while poignant the first time, is too pedestrian and explicit to stand up well to repeat viewing.
These small glitches are probably the result of Eastwood's decision to shoot Paul Haggis' first draft.
For a happier ending try "Cinderella Man." The boxing is just as good, and you will learn a lot you did not know about the great depression, without getting depressed.
Some of the dialog in "Million Dollar Baby" is terse, telling, and unobtrusively beautiful. For example, Scrap tells Frankie that people die every day thinking they never got their shot. It is a short speech, but worthy of the line of poetry about people leading lives of quiet desperation. It should remain in the living language for quite some time. For no reason in particular, this brief scene reminds me also of the captain's eulogy in Master and Commander in which Russell Crowe eulogizes a past-his-prime, low-ranking officer who has committed suicide. Sometimes, says the captain, we do not become the people we wanted to be.
Like other bits of tight,well-thought-out aphorism that have found their way into the narration, these are lifted verbatim from two short stories of F.X. Toole (a pen name). Toole received much notoriety at the age of 70 with the publication of his debut book, a collection of short stories, "Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner," from two of which the screenplay drew. He died on September 12, 2002, in Torrance, California of complications resulting from heart surgery. He was 72-years-old and had recently completed his first novel. His real name was Jerry Boyd. He took the pen name to separate his writing from his boxing. He did not live to see the film crew begin shooting.
"Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner" is dedicated to Dub Huntley, the man who introduced Boyd to boxing, and many of the characters and events related in the book are from Dub Huntley's life and experience. Huntley trained Boyd to box and to be a corner man, starting when Boyd was in his early 40's. Huntley and Boyd became close friends during the decades they worked together. Eventually, Boyd began writing again, but kept it a secret in the boxing world by using a pen name he fashioned from the names Francis Xavier and Peter O'Toole.
For years after giving up his role as a boxer, Boyd acted as a cut man and assistant trainer to Huntley. In that role, Boyd worked with female professional boxer, Juli Crockett. Huntley later told Sports Illustrated that Crockett was the basis for the character of Maggie Fitzgerald in "Million Dollar Baby."
Juli Crockett, was born in Enterprise, Alabama, in 1975. In her first professional bout, she knocked out her opponent 70 seconds into the first round. Maggie also scores a quick knockout in her first fight. Crockett retired from professional boxing, undefeated, when she was still under 30.
Also a writer and director, Crockett is the daughter of writers Linda Crockett and Daniel Savage Gray. She earned a BFA in acting from The Tisch School in New York, and an MFA in directing from the California Institute of the Arts.
Boyd's first sale -- a short story about a cut man who seeks revenge on a scheming boxer -- did not come until 1999. He sold it to Zyzzyva, a small San Francisco literary journal he picked out of "Writer's Market," a directory of publications seeking material. He told Terri Gross on NPR that when the editor called, "For the first time in my life I used the word `flabbergasted.'"
Boyd surprised the regulars at the L.A. Boxing Club when "Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner" was published by Ecco Press, an imprint of Harper Collins, in 2000. They had no idea Boyd was a writer.
Boyd was a genuine tough-guy who once had part of his right ear bitten off during a fight with a thief who had been robbing his British sports car. As a writer, Boyd/Toole, kept on writing with only a few breaks through forty years of rejection slips. He wrote short stories, novels, plays and screenplays.
For a brief periods Boyd would give up writing. He told Terri Gross on Fresh Air (NPR, from WHYY, Philadelphia), "I decided I wasn't going to hurt like that any more." A broken nose, he asserted, was easier to take than another brown envelope, returning another rejected manuscript. He always came back.
"I'd say ... I don't have any talent. I'm not going to do it anymore," he told the San Francisco Chronicle after "Rope Burns" was published.
After having known and worked closely with Boyd for decades, Huntley could not recall Boyd's ever having mentioned that he was also a writer. "Jerry is a guy, I don't care what would happen--he could have made a million dollars with that book -- and he'd still be the same Jerry," Huntley said.
At the time of his death, Boyd was in the final stages of preparing the manuscript of his boxing novel, "Pound for Pound," which is set on the Texas-Mexico border.
In February, 2005, Harper Perennial re-titled "Rope Burns" as "Million Dollar Baby: Stories from the Corner." It is available in paperback from Amazon. Early in 2006, Harper Collins published "Pound for Pound: A Novel".
There are really only three characters in this film. Freeman, as Scrap, doubles as the narrator. He has better-written material to narrate here than he had in "March of the Penguins," which he also narrated. Whenever he narrates, his voice brings authority, precision, and penetration to each and every word.
Eastwood, as Frankie, doubles as director, and writes much of the haunting score.
SPOILER ALERT!! FINAL WARNING!
Swank, as Maggie, is not quite as well-drawn as the heroine of "Girl Fight," but she, like Eastwood, brings pathos to many scenes that require "doing nothing, very well." She reaches the peaks of performance she attained in "Boys Don't Cry." After that film and this one, there might be concern she might be typecast as a "manly-girl." That kind of typecasting would be unfair, in my view.
Frankie begs the priest understand his dilemma. The priest pontificates while Frankie shows, again without doing much, that he is becoming more and more desperate. After a few minutes, the priest calmly stands up and walks away, leaving Frankie alone. The audience empathizes with Frankie when he sheds his restrained tears.
In the end, this is an old story. Frankie is ready, finally, to kill the girl he has trained, who is about the same age as his daughter, the girl he has learned to respect, and trust, and care about, the girl who almost became a champion while he was still her manager and trainer. She has suffered enough. The old story of Abraham preparing to kill his only son, Isaac, because God told him to, seems relevant here. Do you kill the person you love most? Is the line between love and euthanasia so thin?
These are questions no one can answer satisfactorily. No matter how many films are made, no matter how many sermons are preached, no matter how much advice is lovingly given, we remain, each of us, alone with these questions.
Watching this film, attentively, once, helps. Don't watch it again.
Bonus Features
Maggie shares some background with the real boxer, Lucia Rijker, who plays Maggie's dirty-fighting nemesis in her final fight. They both spent their childhoods poverty. Lucia's mother was ungrateful whenever her daughter brought home something she had bought with her fight money -- a sofa, for example. In the documentary on DVD, "Born to Fight," Rijker says she always wanted to buy her mother a decent house, as Maggie does in the film.
Like "Danger," Rijker tells us, she was put in the ring by an irresponsible fighter. At first she succeeded, but then she was beaten to pulp and had to be rescued, like "Danger," from her professional assailant. "Danger" is played by Jay Baruchel. It is a role that does not seem to fit the film, until you realize that the gym is populated with misfits, far from the main stream, of whom "Danger," an orphan with nowhere else to go, is simply an extreme example.
In "Producers Round 15 ," Albert S. Ruddy, who also produced "Walker, Texas Ranger" for CBS, discloses that he used writer Paul Haggis there, and so, when Haggis called him, asking for the opportunity to write the screenplay for "Million Dollar Baby," Ruddy said, "Yes."
Haggis had been tracking the short story for awhile, hoping to write the screenplay and direct. Haggis was surprised to find that the author of the story, F.X. Toole, had, in addition to a background as a boxer and cut man, experience as a bullfighter (In the 1950's he was gored three times.), and looked more like a poet than a prize-fighter.
Co-Producer, Tom Rosenberg, tells us he had a connection to Swank and knew enough of her background to be sure she would bring authenticity to the role of Maggie, the poor girl struggling to overcome poverty.
Rosenberg connected with the short story because he had worked as a lawyer in a small town in the rural south, not far from where the Maggie's family was set.
The round-table with Inside The Actor's Studio host, Robert Lipton brings a lot out of Morgan Freeman that nobody knows. Eastwood is more guarded. Swank says almost nothing, except that her mother took her to Hollywood when she was fifteen years old, and struggled mightily to promote her daughter's career, despite their poverty.
The bonus features are worth watching. They reveal many obscure facts about the movie, the stories on which it was based, the cast, and the writers.
Do the bonus features make the DVD worth owning? You be the judge.
Description of Million Dollar Baby (Two-Disc Widescreen Edition)
"I DON'T TRAIN GIRLS", trainer Frankie Dunn growls. But something's different about the spirited boxing hopeful who shows up daily at Dunn's gym. All she wants is a fighting chance. Clint Eastwood plays Dunn and directs, produces and composes music for this acclaimed, multi-award-winning tale of heart, hope and family. Hilary Swank plays resilient Maggie, determined not to abandon her one dream. And Morgan Freeman is Scrap, gym caretaker and counterpoint to Dunn's crustiness. Grab your dreams and come out swinging.DVD Features:
Documentaries
Featurette
Interviews
Clint Eastwood's 25th film as a director, Million Dollar Baby stands proudly with Unforgiven and Mystic River as the masterwork of a great American filmmaker. In an age of bloated spectacle and computer-generated effects extravaganzas, Eastwood turns an elegant screenplay by Paul Haggis (adapted from the book Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner by F.X. Toole, a pseudonym for veteran boxing manager Jerry Boyd) into a simple, humanitarian example of classical filmmaking, as deeply felt in its heart-wrenching emotions as it is streamlined in its character-driven storytelling. In the course of developing powerful bonds between "white-trash" Missouri waitress and aspiring boxer Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), her grizzled, reluctant trainer Frankie Dunn (Eastwood), and Frankie's best friend and training-gym partner Eddie "Scrap-Iron" Dupris (Morgan Freeman), 74-year-old Eastwood mines gold from each and every character, resulting in stellar work from his well-chosen cast. Containing deep reserves of love, loss, and the universal desire for something better in hard-scrabble lives, Million Dollar Baby emerged, quietly and gracefully, as one of the most acclaimed films of 2004, released just in time to earn an abundance of year-end accolades, all of them well-deserved. --Jeff Shannon
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