But even when romance is presented with the literary means of naturalism, the heroic central figure still embodies the overarching values the group dreams of fantastic heroes arising to defend. This is probably clearest in To Kill a Mockingbird. Scout doesn't take up Atticus's "sword" (that we know of, by becoming a civil rights lawyer, for instance), but seen through her eyes that sword is about the gleamingest weapon of truth and justice in American movies. When romance intersects with naturalism, the values don't even have to be as broad-based as the message of tolerance in To Kill a Mockingbird to function. In Hobson's Choice and Little Voice we cheer simply to see the heroine overthrow the tyranny of her father and mother, respectively.
It even works for the values to be in contest within the romance. Major Barbara, for instance, culminates in a battle of wits between the daughter's Christian altruism and her father's perverse, aphoristic militarism. And it's even okay for the values to fail. Thus, in Die Walküre you feel something dolefully inevitable in the social restrictions on human will that allegorically require the break between the paternal god and his illegitimate warrior daughter. (Because romance is a genre devoted to fantasizing it doesn't hurt that an accurate paraphrase of the upshot of the father-daughter romance in Die Walküre may be ludicrous: We can't let our Wish-Maidens fly around on horses defending incest, after all.)
So what romance values does Maggie embody in her quest for the title in Million Dollar Baby? Same as in the first Rocky and Flashdance: the importance of getting your shot at glory, even if you fail. Scrap tells Frankie that this is enough, even though he himself lost an eye in the process, but the movie doesn't coordinate this with the fact that since then Scrap has settled down to life as a janitor in a moldering gym with holes in his socks. Since it's Morgan Freeman playing him we don't think Scrap is simply justifying bad choices, even in part, or that he's not that bright, or talking out his ass. Maggie gets her shot, so why is the picture so determinedly melancholy? Rocky lost the big fight but got Adrian, and yes it's corny but it makes common sense--You do what you feel you have to in the world but your personal life is where you live. What's added to the story in Million Dollar Baby by having Maggie fail?
A plausible explanation wouldn't be enough because it's not that kind of story. If Million Dollar Baby were a work of naturalism, then what happens to Maggie would have to be representative of the risks that women boxers commonly run just by getting in the ring. But in Maggie's fatal prizefight the German fighter hits her from behind after the bell has rung, and what happens next is pure accident. This would work as naturalism only if there were something about women's boxing that made cheating and mishaps more likely (as would be the case if the fights were illegal or unregulated, for instance). And the harm Maggie comes to ought to be connected to Frankie's specialty as a cutman, as Scrap's loss of his eye was.
![Member of the Wedding [VHS]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51EEM766XNL._SL120_.jpg)
![Hobson's Choice [VHS]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51149QNT7XL._SL120_.jpg)
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Aaman
Apart from being bad html in your title link (nesting two links is a no-no and can cause some browsers to break), this is an excellent review - well-reasoned, cinema ecrire at its best.
Violence is sex, in many ways - so this film is not as chaste as it seems.
Eastwood is trained by virtue of all his westerns as a naturalist - but just like the westerns were a sham, a facade of the real West, perhaps he, too is unable to distinguish between realism and naturalism - not the first person to mistake the flicker for the real image.
Thanks for the review
2 - Eric Olsen
Alan, you are often, though not always (yet another unpredictability), the great contrarian, running a course between entertainment (my primary cinematic interest, usually) and high intellectualism: always turning up the sod most others are content to tread upon.
Fixed the title, html in title or excerpt can fry, as Aaman mentioned
3 - Alan Dale
Hey Amman,
Good to know about nested links. Thanks for that. And thanks for the review of the review.
I agree that violence can be sexual in some ways, but that describes violence in Sam Peckinpah or Brian De Palma movies more than in Million Dollar Baby. Eastwood has always been, to my mind, a very unsexy star. Does anyone think of him as being paired with his female co-stars? But I was actually speaking more literally in my review. Why shouldn't Maggie have a sex life? Or Scrap? (Yet another wise old neuter role for Morgan Freeman.) Why does nobody even eye anyone else? What world is this taking place in?
4 - Alan Dale
Hey Eric,
Thanks again for the praise. I don't WANT to be contrarian. I'd be truly content to enjoy and praise Clint Eastwood "tragedies"--if they weren't so monotonously serious and slow. Every time, however, the numbness starts in my brain and spreads from there to my butt. Agony.
5 - Eric Olsen
tell it like it is, brother
6 - RJ
That is one seriously grand review.
Makes me proud to be a member of this site. :)
7 - Alan Dale
Thanks, RJ. Ordinarily I think it's the good movies that bring out the best in a critic. So I have to hand it to Eastwood: neither Mystic River nor Million Dollar Baby is ordinary bad. Because they go wrong in so many ways their badness required me to think more intently and precisely, albeit forensically, about genre than almost anything else released in the past couple years.
8 - Eric Olsen
old Clint isn't exactly jolly in his Golden Years
9 - Isaac Abrahamson
I agree this review is erudite, provocative. Its analysis is interesting and offers useful a fruitful interpretive perspective. I think it may fall a bit into the critical contrarian's trap: does it fail to perceive the cause of success? Perhaps there are plenty of other critics to offer praise, but Million Dollar Baby seems to work with a vast audience. I suggest its failure within genre expectations contributes to its success. Among other things, it helps inject plausible, familiar character agency (e.g., the haplessly selfish mother's inability to grovel) into moments that pose an unfamiliar moral or personal test.
To evaluate Eastwood, I tried to imagine the storyline as factual. Pushing familiar into unlikely, it's generally plausible but no more likely than the one to 6.5 billion chance we all have. Imagining the "true story" directed by someone else suggests to me an unbearable inspiration- or tear-fest. In this light, Eastwood succeeds as a unique stylist rather than a literary virtuoso--a Jimmy Page rock star with deeper inflections, not a Miles Davis master with lighter leanings. (Also, jazzy west-coast hipsters are getting pretty old.)
It's fine to see the film boring or otherwise to walk away from what it offers. I agree its structure and writing fail on their own as rather uninteresting, and I'm not praising it to friends. But I'm also not warning people against its spell. I found entrancement in its remarkably slow pacing and quietly deceptive clarity. That was enough for me for two hours.
10 - Eric Olsen
super comment Isaac, worthy of the review and that's saying something
11 - Rodney Welch
I haven't the slightest idea why anyone has problems with the structure of Million Dollar Baby, and Alan's statement that the script is "too cumbersome for Eastwood to manage effectively and too disjointed to bear the significance he wants it to" doesn't make a grain of sense.
If there's one thing the movie has, it's a very clear, direct, and thoroughly traditional story line, which is precisely why it is as effective as it is.
In fact, part of the effectiveness -- and I haven't noticed anyone else saying this -- can I think be summed up by another very successful picture: The Shawshank Redemption. Whatever its flaws, that movie showed the power of telling a big story with Morgan Freeman serving as both an observer and a voice-over narrator. (Up and coming screenwriters are taught to hate voice-overs; supposedly they're a cheap way out. But some of the greatest movies in the world have them, and they are respobsible for some of the most memorable lines.)
Effective to me, however, is not effective to Alan, but I can't see movies through Alan's eyes. He squints too hard. Alan is an utter genius, but he's wasting himself writing about movies; he ought to move to France and make instructional videos for the abstract philosophy department at the Sorbonne or something. You learn less about a movie from his exhaustive, colon-blowing reviews than you learn about his somewhat constipated aesthetics -- which, I'll admit, are not entirely without interest. The main thing I learn from Alan's reviews is the kind of movie he wishes it could have been, and I very often find myself grateful it didn't get made that way.
12 - Eric Olsen
agreement with judgment passed has very little to do with my judgment of a review
13 - Rodney Welch
Eric, I read and admire criticism everyday I don't agree with at all. I admire it because it's a different way of seeing the movie. With Alan's reviews you just keep seeing Alan, scrubbing the movie down with a toothbrush and then imagining some underpainting that isn't to his liking.
14 - dbcooper
You learn less about a movie from his exhaustive, colon-blowing reviews than you learn about his somewhat constipated aesthetics -- which, I'll admit, are not entirely without interest. The main thing I learn from Alan's reviews is the kind of movie he wishes it could have been, and I very often find myself grateful it didn't get made that way.
Nice job Rodney.
15 - Alan Dale
More later, but for right now, 2 points:
1) A "very clear, direct, and thoroughly traditional story line" is an odd claim given how much people have been making of the hairpin turn-around in the plot; and
2) Both "colon-blowing" and "constipated"? Who wouldn't squint?
16 - Eric Olsen
perhaps these were meant to be sequential
17 - Rodney Welch
1.) Getting the hell beaten out of you, winding up in a wheelchair, and asking for a mercy killing is a perfectly logical sequence of events. One thing follows quite credibly from another, eventhough it may not be exactly what we expected. And the story is highly traditional as boxing movies go, or as sports movies or cop movies go: the grizzled old cynic who first discourages the young up-and-comer and then admires his/her spirit. It's a pairing you see in movie after movie, and the familiarity actually works in the movie's favor: we settle into it, and what starts as a movie about beating the odds becomes a movie where the odds are suddenly raised. It notches up the drama, too, and it manages to do so without sentimentality.
2.) Precisely.
18 - Alan Dale
Hey Isaac,
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. Not trying to understand why people like a popular movie is indeed a failing in critics. I did try to suggest what the appeal is--Scrap and Frankie's banter, Frankie and Maggie's relationship, Eastwood's feelings about ageing.
With respect to its "vast audience," however, it's a mistake to overstate Million Dollar Baby's popularity. Like Mystic River, it's primarily a success with critics and people who give awards. Look at its box office performance: it has just made back its (low) cost, and despite adding 15 screens since last weekend made 29% less money. In two weeks Hide and Seek has made more than Million Dollar Baby has made in eight and Hide and Seek even made more last weekend despite a 59.4% drop in its revenue. Of course, the number of people who have seen Million Dollar Baby is "vast" compared to how many people read me, but not in mass audience terms. It's 79th on the 2004 box office list and has made half of what White Chicks made. Less than half of what Garfield: The Movie made. About one-eighth of Meet the Fockers.
19 - Phil Latio
I must echo Rodney's comments. Alan's reviews belong only in some quarterly film criticism journal from a pompous Ivy League school (not a shock when you consider the institutions Alan attended). They scream, "Look at me, I'm smart and can pick a movie apart with my flowery prose!" He tries for a Scorsese-like knowledge of film history, but it comes off like he's toggling back and forth from imdb.com. I read his reviews only to watch all of you slob his knob after one of his novel-length borefests.
20 - Alan Dale
"There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."
--Oscar Wilde
21 - Phil Latio
"The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth." --
Alfred Whitehead
22 - Eric Olsen
Alan has a specific, consistent personal style that is exceptionally erudite, rewarding and subtle. I find it never less than fascinating and edifying and while highly intellectual, never precious, stilted or pretentious. He is what he is and I don't see it changing much - what I see in these complaints is kind of like criticizing water for being wet.
23 - Rodney Welch
Oh Eric, stilted and pretentious aren't the HALF of it. Alan doesn't even write like a human being; he's like some whirring old IBM machine that's been programmed to produce the most pedestrian possible thoughts with the smuggest possible attitude in the wordiest possible way.
Know what you want to say and say it as clearly as possible, that's the old rule, but it's apparently lost on anyone who writes sentences like the following one:
He has thus taken a romance form and filmed it as though it were naturalism while using it as the vehicle for both an out-of-focus epic vision and a symbolic elegy for his own decline.
Movies antagonize Alan, I think. They defeat him. They pour more thoughts into his head than he can control, which not only pisses him off but sends him flying in several directions at once, hurling grab-ass literary references at whatever target he can find. I mean, come on -- this fucking thing pulls in Harper Lee AND Richard Wagner AND G.B. Shaw AND Dickens AND Spanglish and every other other thing under the sun, and it does so without an ounce of passionate engagement, just a lot of dot-matrix blather spewing out of Alan 2.7.
24 - Alan Dale
Now for the negative stuff. Let me first point out that I predicted lanced-boil comments like these in the last paragraph of my Million Dollar Baby review b/c I'm criticizing a movie in terms that the people who like it will feel put down by--though that is not at all my intention. Mostly what's being vented isn't reasoned critique but abuse: I'm a useless bore, I'm pissed off but as incapable of passion as a computer, I'm pompous, I'm a show-off, I shit too much and I don't shit enough. Rodney, in particular, has created a whole fantasy version of me. Has it not occurred to him that knowing me personally might be a prerequisite to writing about me, as opposed to my opinions, or that at this point his escalating vituperation says more about him than about me?
If true, everything these people have said would be true of my writing when they agree with me as well, but people never write to abuse you when they agree with you. Which probably accounts not only for the belligerence but the anti-intellectualism and the incoherence of the defenses of the movie as well. (Maggie doesn't get the hell beaten out of her by the German; what does it mean to say the "odds" are raised--did he mean the stakes? and what would that mean?) Rodney isn't any more precise in his criticism of my writing. The sentence he quotes in his fourth comment isn't meant to be understood out of context. (I'm not writing blurbs for movie ads.) That sentence is a summary of the argument leading up to it and the point is that an accurate description of all the elements of the story is "cumbersome."
Movies don't "antagonize" me, they bore me when they aren't more than conventional product, and "pompous" and "flowery" are about as far from describing my writing accurately as words can get. Talk about robotic responses! How consistently do you have to write favorably about slapstick, scatological humor, and pornography, before people stop saying you're a typical Ivy League academic? I think my writing is perhaps most unusual in that my fundamental outlook is ironic. (Which is one form that a "passionate engagement" can take. The fact that I go against the market is a sign my writing is personal rather than the reverse.) Movies are mostly crap, always have been, probably always will be, certainly as long as the majority of the audience, like Rodney, think that a movie's use of devices already familiar from movie after movie can work in its favor.
What I write, however, doesn't even border on philosophy (which is always abstract, isn't it?). It's literary structuralism. This is the main reason for the references to books and movies, etc., because structuralism requires an overview that stretches back farther than The Shawshank Redemption, all of ten years old in a history of western narrative dating back over 3,000 years. In addition, it's an attempt to do for others what I appreciated having done for me. In her reviews Pauline Kael referred very widely to older movies and literature and I was grateful to have someone point me toward them and put them in context so they were more than just data from a database like IMDB.
It's funny in a sick kind of way that this would draw fire on a website devoted to criticism. It's like the way Eric Olsen was attacked for comparing two of Johnny Depp's performances last week, as if this were an outrage in the course of criticism rather than one of its basic approaches. And as for the common charge that the critic is "just" trying to make the movie over into the kind of movie he wishes it had been: Well, duh. If someone says, "That movie sucked!" he is inherently saying he wishes it had been a movie that hadn't sucked. Pressed even a little bit, he'll start describing what was wrong with the movie, which again implies how the movie could have been better. Children do this. Everyone does it. But if you try to tease out your reasons for thinking it sucked, and if you refer to stuff outside someone's range of reference, then, pal, you can just go to ... France. (The critics who have meant the most to me are almost all Anglo-American, by the way.)
These commenters are entitled to their opinions, but no amount of abuse gives me any reason to do anything differently. (As the last presidential campaign showed, I think, personally directed invective works only on people who already agree with you.) I would suggest that if I drive them as crazy as they claim they should pass on by next time, unless, of course, they enjoy hating me as much as they seem to.
25 - Aaman
I find Rodney's comment somewhat aggravating - good writing utilizes allusions and devices such as subordinate clauses, as Alan's work does, to capture a specific idiom or set a frame of reference. That alone, cannot be cause to question the writing ability of the poster. There are far worse writers out there.
Film criticism, like all art criticism is prone to the same mud-slinging and abusive communication as politics - a good case in point is the New Yorker review of "Eats, Shoots and Leaves".