In his day, he was a top corner man, and put enough together to buy a seedy gym, The Hit Pit, where he trains boxers. She’s determined, but at 32 may be too old to learn the skills to gain self-respect in the ring.įrankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) has seen his best years slip away. In the meantime, Maggie nurtures a dream of putting her life together in the volatile new sport of women’s boxing. She heads to Los Angeles, finds work in yet another greasy diner, where she slips table scraps into her apron pocket to stock her refrigerator. Maggie believes that life holds more for her than a life of waitressing in diners until she can afford to buy a used trailer of her own. She was trash.” Maggie comes out of the Ozarks in southwestern Missouri, where her 300-pound single mother stays on in her trailer park, surviving with her other daughter, also a single mother, on welfare checks, augmented by claims of nonexistent children.

As one character comments: “She grew up knowing one thing. The title character, Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), has held a losing hand as her birthright. In “Million Dollar Baby” he narrows focus to look at three very different people, two of them Irish-Americans, dime-store losers, but underneath the appearances, worth a million. In “Mystic River” (2003), Eastwood looked at an entire Irish-American community that scripted its own downfall. Some defy their apparent destiny and triumph others accept defeat and stop trying still others try and fail, and that is the cruelest human tragedy. As he showed in last year’s “Mystic River,” Eastwood knows some people face enormous roadblocks in life by accident of birth and happenstance.

Million Dollar Baby sounds trite and slangy as the title of Clint Eastwood’s new exploration of the defeat, resilience and triumph of the spirit, but it turns out to be perfect. Poverty and failure can degrade humanity, but before dismissing people as five-and-ten-cent types, it’s wise to examine the criteria for assessing their value. The country had lost confidence in itself, and Bing’s soothing voice assured people that despite their tough economic circumstances, in human terms, they were worth a million dollars.

In 1931, as the Depression tightened its grip on the American imagination, a very young Bing Crosby recorded a Harry Warren jazz ballad with the words, “I found a million dollar baby in a five-and-ten-cent store.” The song became a hit, and its singer went on to become one of the great icons of popular culture.

Million dollar baby true