Reviewed by Peter Veugelaers © 2005
- Better than a cheese royale: buy one while its hot

 The controversy surrounding a latter end plot twist in Million Dollar Baby is quite significant since the preceding story could happen; the characters and plot are not so far removed from a possible reality. The script by Paul Haggis is based on a series of short stories by boxing veteran F.X. Toole – Baby is shades of Rocky, shades of human hospital soap opera, a mix of inspiration and despair. A grim and gritty boxing drama it could make you angry or cry. The part of the story that has offended certain groups has a naturalising effect and is buoyed by effective characterisation: the unnaturalness of Baby’s final sequences is coherent although still laboured.

  Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) is a boxing trainer at L.A’s The Hit Pit and he will not train girls – on second appearances Frankie’s reasons are really quite complex. Caretaker Scrap (Morgan Freeman) was trained by Frankie until his 110^th fight made him blind in one eye. They are friends and Scrap, who sleeps at the gym, narrates in sleepy voice over giving perspective to Eastwood’s gravel resonate, confused, hard boiled, underlying kind character, a rugged individualist, echoes of his sergeant in Heartbreak Ridge, and the Man with No Name from Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. Then Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), Irish and a low paid downtown waitress most of her life, asks Frankie for help in becoming a boxer. She’s determined but he says no until she keeps on training at the gym. Later Frankie reluctantly obliges.

  The training, depicted in a well edited montage sequence, culminates in excellently crafted title bout boxing sequences and in rag to riches feel-good, thumping victory, which might sound corny on paper except the scenario is perceivable and engaging. It is authentic when in this sort of world a mix of low lit lighting and an ordinary cockroach infested gym give the movie an underground ambiance which has no upmarket pretensions and add to the movie’s thematic preoccupations of despair and redemption.

 Adding to the authenticity are the believable characters and performances of the leads which stay with you after you leave the theatre. They are complex, multi-dimensional, and have reasons for being, the strong, and potentially manipulative, social point the movie makes comes from their eyes.