Million Dollar God | Clint Eastwood, Mystic & Million

Clint Eastwood is a man struggling with his faith in God. This much seems clear to me now after watching both Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby, two phenomenal films and surprisingly alike thematically even if the outer skin may appear different, the bone structure and the metaphysical underpinnings remain the same and thematically, both films could almost be identical in the inner-story within the story. .

In Mystic River, just as in Million Dollar Baby, we know what it means to be poor; and if you’ve ever been there, then you know that Jimmy Marcum, that Maggie, like the Savage Brothers and Clint Eastwood as Boss in Million Dollar Baby, that such people do exist and are not merely fictional representations or some Hollywood version what it means to be without and to lack.

No this is the real deal. This is what it means to have a mother who lives in a trailer and lives off of welfare and a sister with too many children married to some overly tattooed motorcycle just out of jail yahoo who just can’t seem to get it together and has a chip on both shoulders and hates you because you are trying to break away from all that and more, he’s found an easy in or out with your sister, whatever the case may be and because she’s just that stupid or insecure or desperate, she is flattered and so is the mother and so they take him in and he becomes, by some force, part of the “family” and because you are different, like Maggie – a boxer who “people laugh at” her mother so nicely tells her (after all that she does for her mother), you are shunted aside in favor o f the new blood.

Hey, never mind that the new blood could really give a shit about your family and is using everyone. And never mind that Maggie, like Boss here, is trying to do the “right thing” it just somehow never seems to work out that way.

Million Dollar Baby, My Darling as she is known (but in Gallic on her shiny green robe,) is The Boss’s last great hope and god, we expect or want that Holly wood ending. Oh, deny it, but in your heart of hearts, you don’t want to see these men suffer as much as they do and even if it doesn’t all wrap up neatly, this amount of suffering seems unfair to almost everyone. We almost always seek some kind of resolution and we just hope that it will work out because a. that’s what we’re used to with big Hollywood blockbusters and b. it’s what we want. Too bad. Tant pis. Don’t expect to get that from Clint Eastwood. If Jimmy Markum can’t find is resolution with his God, if Boss cannot make his peace with his God no matter how hard he may try, then shit, neither can you because that is just real life. At least, that’s what Eastwood seems to be saying.

Article Author: Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti is a published writer in both the United States and Europe. She is widely known for her music commentary, particularly her writings about Bob Dylan about whom she runs a highly-trafficked site. …

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