Critiquing A Million Dollar Critique

I had a rather better reaction to Million Dollar Baby than Jim Emerson, the editor of RogerEbert.com, did; but his essay critiquing the film does deserve to be taken seriously even if, on several points, we disagree. You can read it by clicking above, then read my responses to selected bits below:

"'Sideways' is a movie about characters who reveal themselves slowly and unexpectedly throughout the film; 'MDB' is more of a movie about familiar character types – specifically, movie archetypes. One movie is a picaresque comedy with undertones of failure, loneliness, lost youth and disappointment; the other embraces similar themes, but in the form of a surrogate-familial love story, a boxing movie, and a Greek tragedy. By temperament, I happen to be more fond of the former than the latter."

I'm not going to get into the relative merits of "Sideways", a film I also liked a lot, but I do want to spend some time on Emerson's last sentence, because I think it crucial to his analysis. His central thesis is, after all, that "Million Dollar Baby" fails when it deviates from established forms--whether F.X. Toole's short stories or their generic forebearers. He claims that "Million Dollar Baby" is "a surrogate-familial love story, a boxing movie, and a Greek tragedy." (We'll leave aside that the picaresque and the road picture are also familiar forms.) While I don't quarrel with the surrogate-familial portion, I'm not convinced that "MDB" is an exemplar either of the "boxing movie" or of "Greek tragedy".

What exactly is a "boxing movie"? If it's a genre that simply contains boxing as a central feature, it has to embrace a wide variety of plots, from "Rocky" to "Raging Bull" to "Requiem For a Heavyweight" to "Tyson" to "Million Dollar Baby" to "Great White Hope", all very different films in style, structure, and themes. In "Rocky", the fight becomes a chance for a down-and-out loser like Rocky Balboa to have one great moment, which has less to do with winning than surviving with the champ. "Raging Bull" is about a man who is a master inside of the ring but can't handle anything outside of it--the same can be said, of "Tyson". "Requiem for a Heavyweight" is about how greed breaks the bonds that hold fighter, trainer, and manager together, leading to tragedy. "Great White Hope" is about a boxer who, though a rising star, suffers the hatred of the white fans and the disdain of the black community. "Million Dollar Baby" was about how difficult, and dangerous, the obligations of friendship could become. All of these stories contain boxing, but they're not structurally similar, employ different characters, and set different tones. It's hard to how he can call movies involving boxing "boxing movies" anymore than he can call movies involving real estate salesmen "real-estate-salesman movies". ("Glengarry Glen Ross" and "Babbitt" are very different stories involving the same job.)

As for "Greek tragedy", I wonder how Emerson made the mistake of believing Eastwood intended to make one. The tragedy of "Million Dollar Baby" would not be one that Aristotle would recognize. It would be a stretch to compare Maggie's failure to heed Frank's warning to "protect herself at all times" with hubris; neither is it reasonable to conclude that Maggie's fate in the movie was in some way fated at the beginning. The movie has multiple subplots, missing all three of the unities. It does not deal in the classical devices of reversal or recognition, and its lead character is not brought down because of an inner perversion that spoils all of her nobility. If anything, the same passion that fueled Maggie's rise in the ring also fueled her suicide, a trait more familiar to Shakespearean tragedy than to the Greek (See "MacBeth", "Coriolanus", "Lear", "Romeo and Juliet", "Hamlet", or "Othello"). Indeed, with the Danger and Family subplots, and the chatter with the priest just before Frank heads off to give the poison to his Maggie, the entire story seemed to me to owe a good deal more to the Bard (whom Ben Jonson took to task for his messy plotting) than to Sophocles.

I can see the advantage for Emerson in invoking the Greeks. The plot structure suggested in the Poetics is rigid, making it easy to hold up to "Million Dollar Baby" in order to accuse it of failure. But since Eastwood never tried to make a film according to that structure, it doesn't surprise me that the finished product didn't conform to it.

This leaves us with "surrogate-familial love story". I'm not an expert in this particular form, having never heard of it until just now, so I suppose I'll have to leave Emerson that one. Of course, Emerson doesn't give us a primer on this genre's rules, so it's hard to say where Eastwood may have failed to follow them.

On to individual complaints:

"For me, that point first comes when Frankie and Maggie go to Las Vegas for the big fight … and Scrap stays behind. In a tightly woven, classically plotted film, you don’t suddenly leave your trusty sidekick character (and your narrator!) behind for the climax of the story – especially when he’s been established as virtually the only friend in the world for the two other main characters. It’s completely unnecessary (except that the movie splits in two here, with the “Frozen Water” story taking place at the Hit Pit and the “Million Dollar Baby” story continuing independently in Vegas)."

Actually, that's not the climax of the story. That won't come until later, but why split hairs? I must admit I wondered about Scrap's decision as well, but Morgan Freeman sold me that he had his reasons for hanging back and I went with it without too much thought. Further I'm dubious that he would have served much of a function in the championship fight scene if he had gone. In a tightly woven, classically plotted film, you don't bring characters to the scene who serve no purpose in it. (Morgan Freeman gave a perfectly good reaction shot from his bed while he was watching the fight on television.)

"Perhaps the corniest and most unconvincing moment in the movie comes when Scrap hauls off and punches Shawrelle for beating up on Danger. In the story, it’s not an old, one-eyed man who KOs a boxer in his prime, but the owner of the gym for whom Scrap works. That man, Curtis “Hymn” Odom, is much younger closer to Shawrelle’s age and still at his prime fighting weight. In fact, Scrap used to train him, and now he works for him. The only reason Hymn isn’t still fighting is that “he got a detach eye.” It makes a lot more sense that this guy could and would clock Shawrelle than ol’ Scrap."

Yeah, but, while it's established that Shawrelle is in his prime, it's also established that he really isn't any good. He has no heart, as Scrap says early in the picture. He can throw a punch but he can't absorb one. My impression was that Scrap took Shawrelle out because he surprised him and Shawrelle forgot what he was supposed to do in response. Mentally, Shawrelle is a poor fighter. Now, it probably would have been a better scene if Eastwood had followed the Toole story and had Odom knock Shawrelle out; but it would have added another secondary character to the piece whose sole function in the story would be to knock Shawrelle out. In a plot that Emerson already thinks is messy, why would adding more characters do it any favors?

"Why would Scrap write to this missing daughter to recount a story about another daughter-figure that Frankie loved and then was forced to help die? What is incommunicado-daughter supposed to make of that little tale? To Scrap, the story shows that Frankie was a tragic figure and “a good man” (not a “heroic” figure, as some anti-euthanasia right-wingers have claimed). But it would have been more satisfying, and less preposterous, if he’d just told us that, and let Frankie’s daughter be."

Search me why he does it. I doubt he thinks his letter will have any better luck than Frank's did. Since we don't know what separated Frank from his daughter it's hard to say. (I don't remember whether Scrap knows the reason for the estrangement or not.) Maybe he hopes it will help or will at least show Frank's daughter a side of Frank she never knew. What is she supposed to make of that little tale? I don't know, neither does Scrap maybe. Does Mr. Emerson? Also, I rather like that he was telling this story to someone, rather than talking to the air.

"Richard T. Jameson, in Variety, has written about the exemplary use of the stool in the boxing ring, as a semi-comic recurring motif that suddenly turns tragic. That’s the movie’s classical bloodline showing through to its best advantage.

"But, to me, “Million Dollar Baby” seems a little too calculated to be convincing; it’s so self-consciously “classical” and fussy in its austere design, that it seems clinical – more of an exercise in filmmaking than a fully reazlized film. At times it made me think of a paint-by-numbers masterpiece, if there can be such a thing.

"Anyone familiar with classical story structure, for example, will perk up when Maggie tells the story of her lost father and his German Shepherd, Axel. This occurs, on cue, in the movie’s second act, and if you’ve been paying any attention, you pretty much know where the movie’s going from there on (though in the book, Maggie tells this story in the hospital, as part of her attempt to persuade Frankie to help her die). In this kind of traditional picture, when a girl tells her new father-figure a fond story about her real dad who had to shoot his beloved dog when old Axel went lame … well, that’s the rest of your story, right there."

Yeah, but for me that only operated in retrospect. At the time it read to me as colorful character detail. I hadn't been expecting her to end up in a position where she might want to be put to sleep. (By the time she broke her neck in the ring, I'd pretty much forgotten it.) So if Mr. Emerson could really see where the movie was going from those lines the first time through, I must get the name of his optician. Also, why is this on cue? What was the cue? I don't remember there being an obvious cue.

As for Eastwood's treatment of Maggie's parents, I'd say it didn't strike me as outrageously over-the-top. The scene where Maggie's mother describes her as an embarrassment wasn't gratuitous. Though Maggie's mother wasn't conscious of it (most likely), it struck me as the ultimate double insult. "Imagine," her subtext goes, "that you could be an embarrassment to someone like me. Do you know how low that makes you?" From the look on her face when her mother attacks her, Maggie is more conscious of the full meaning of that insult than her mother is. It's the condition she'd be hoping to escape through boxing and through the gift of the house--and her mother tells her no, you're still there. You're still lower than me. Maggie's crime, where her mother was concerned, was in trying to be anything better than her mother. For me, the question of the hospital scene is whether these characters would be likely to act in this way under these circumstances. The answer strikes me as a yes, because their objective in the scene is not simply to get the house, but also to put Maggie squarely in her place. Greed wasn't the only emotion at work in this scene. Envy and schadenfreude showed up as well. When the mother stuck the pen in Maggie's mouth it was a final attempt to humiliate and infantilize her. Would the scene have played better Toole's way? If you decide that all Maggie's mother wanted was the money, but that was not what Eastwood decided.

Finally, there's the issue of Maggie's suicide:

"This brings me to my final major problem with “Million Dollar Baby,” which is Maggie’s transformation from a fighter (in every sense of the word) to a would-be suicide. We all bring our own baggage to the movies we see, and maybe it’s because I have fought my own battles with suicidal depression nearly all my life that I just didn’t buy Maggie as the suicidal type. Yes, we are told that paraplegics and quadriplegics often go through a suicidal phase – though, as some have pointed out, it is likely to be most serious once they have been through rehabilitative therapy and realize that this is about as much as they’re ever going to recover. But ever-spunky Maggie doesn't convey that level of despair and resignation. Her choice, therefore, seemed more a function of structural symmetry than one of human suffering, dictated by the plot rather than by the character."

Yes, Maggie's character was spunky, but she was spunky in a particular direction. Her sustaining drive was to fight in the ring. Most world class fighters have trained since childhood to do it. To start at Maggie's age would require extraordinary dedication to the trianing of her body and brain to the task of knocking another person unconscious. To lose all that, forever, to an ordinary career ending injury--detached retina, broken eye socket, torn rotator cuff, or organ damage--would be traumatic enough. To lose the entire body--to become a head--for a world class athlete would be a special kind of hell. It would mean never again doing the one thing in the world that she trained to do. Even athletes who retire from the sport because of simple age often need extensive counseling to face a life outside of their sport. (Each NFL team has an office dedicated to that.)

Hell, we're all terrified of one particular form of ruin. For me, it's profound brain injury or disease. Alzheimer's scares the shit out of me. The idea of losing memories, losing me, even as I sit there and watch, makes me physically sick. I think I could take anything but that. Cut my arms off, give me tumors, fire bullets through me, I'll fight to overcome them all and live; but show me a future with Alzheimers and I'll fight to die because I'll figure I'll have seen all I need to see.

That's where Maggie was, and as I recall she said as much toward the end of the film. There simply wasn't anything else she could think of to want in this world, and a future paralyzed scared the hell out of her. Would I have made that choice? Not under those conditions but maybe under others that scare me as much. I didn't need, as Emerson says he did, a longer period to watch her cope with it. I've written such transitional scenes many times over the years, and have always removed them later because I knew they were meant to make me feel better, not to simulate how real people make decisions. In real life decisions come quickly and often appear unearned to the outside observer. How much rehab would have allowed us to feel good about Maggie's decision to kill herself? How many tearful fights with Frank would the film have to parade for us? Three? Four? A dozen? Perhaps we could wheel in the obligatory scenes with psychiatrists and social workers. I'm sure they're stashed away somewhere in stock footage for the occasion. To bring us back to Greek tragedy for a moment, how many transition scenes were there between Oedipus's discovery that he'd murdered his father and married his mother and the time we see him blind and ragged. None. He runs off, and afterwards Creon and the Chrous describe what happened to Oedipus and Iocaste offstage. Fast forward to Shakespeare. Romeo needed no transition scenes to bring him to suicide in the crypt. He'd made the decision within seconds of hearing Juliet was dead. Othello went just as quickly after he'd leared what a fool he'd been to trust Iago. The rage he'd turned outward on Desdemona, then on Iago, he finally turned upon himself--a victim of his own passion. To use a more contemporary example, Keller in Arthur Miller's "All My Sons" kills himself within moments after a letter Keller had never read from his dead son reveals that his boy hated him for having filled planes with substandard parts. Transition scenes would have been a waste. Lesser writers stick them in a futile effort to convince himself and his audience that the person has earned a ticket out of life. Like funerals and wakes, such rituals are for us, not the victim.

The way it's done in "Million Dollar Baby", in its suddenness, stings more. It forces on us the question of whether what she wanted was justified, whether she was giving up too easily, and what Frank's real moral responsiblities were to his friend. And we're still stuck with those questions, some of the most awful that can be asked. People are still fighting about it, and will still be fighting about it, in the months and years to come. If this quality alone doesn't make "Million Dollar Baby" a great film, I don't know what does.