Million Dollar Baby Review

Paul Haggis spent four years trying to sell the script, and Eastwood shot it in under forty days, with Tom Stern lighting the gym as a cave of shadows where faces surface for a line and sink back. For two thirds of its length it is a sports film made with unusual tact. Hilary Swank, who put on nineteen pounds of muscle, makes Maggie's hunger physical rather than inspirational; Morgan Freeman narrates as Scrap, the half-blind former fighter who sweeps the floors, with a storyteller's patience; and Eastwood's Frankie, estranged from his daughter and needling his priest about theology, is his best performance since Unforgiven.

Then the film turns, in a way the marketing concealed and in a direction that made Andrew Sarris write that no movie in his memory had depressed him more, and its final act drew protests in 2005. Eastwood stages it without special pleading, which is the source of both its power and the objections. The weak spots are the caricatures around the edges, above all Maggie's grasping family and an opponent drawn with a crayon. It won Best Picture, Director, Actress and Supporting Actor, and Roger Ebert called it a masterpiece, pure and simple.