Lot's Wife Edition 8 2013

FILM & TV
ing, injury and obsession through a vigorous focus on boxing as a sport
that can destroy its competitors. But these films also show us that these
competitors can be remarkable people — people with relentless determination,
a fascinating appetite for combat, and overpowering self-belief.
Million Dollar Baby presents to us both the allure of the sport and a dark
caution about its frightening risks. We always see these things together:
scenes of Maggie’s charming and magnetic rise, performed impeccably by
Hillary Swank, interrupted by those of Frankie’s tormented reflections,
presented by that characteristic Eastwood expression. It should be said,
though, that Maggie’s (successful) fights are truly the most entertaining
and even comic scenes of the film. The film doesn’t downplay the ‘magic’
of boxing; it even goes to poetic lengths to explain it to us.
Scrap says the ‘magic’ about the sport lies in ‘fighting battles beyond
endurance, beyond cracked ribs … risking everything for a dream that
nobody sees but you’. Maggie clearly feels the same way, but her passion
for the sport is further founded in a kind of all-or-nothing choice. Maggie
sees boxing as her way out of everything. Her charming personality and
optimism is never enough to hide her deep dissatisfaction with her life
outside the sport. Eastwood sets up a decision where the allure of the
game is the trump card in Maggie’s decision. This is not to say that the
sport vitiates her career choices, but simply to stress that the film highlights
something disarming about sports, even those which are the closest
to unrestrained physical combat — to fighting, pure and simple. And it
is Maggie’s attraction to the sport which makes the incident, arising out
of her opponent’s malicious conduct, all the more painful. To be sure, the
film makes us feel truly great anger about the opponent, but it equally and
soberly reminds us of an inconvenient truth: that this conduct is a deplorable,
but maybe unavoidable, by-product of a sport premised on inflicting
physical injury.
Scrap is the only person who can rationalise the whole thing and
come to some sort of peace about it. He tries to comfort Frankie and give
him perspective about his sense of responsibility for Maggie’s condition.
Scrap’s thoughts give us a painful but honest account of the desperation
and joy with which Maggie and all boxers alike hope to find success in
their sport:
“It was because of you that she was fighting the championship of
the world. You did that. People die everyday, Frankie — mopping floors,
washing dishes and you know what their last thought is? I never got my
shot. Because of you Maggie got her shot. If she dies today you know what
her last thought would be? I think I did all right.”
The film presents this as a persuasive interpretation — a feasible
translation of the American Dream to boxing — but it doesn’t, I think,
give us enough cause to accept it outright. Yes, it shows us these pictures
of Maggie running up and down the beach, relentlessly training herself to
impress Frankie, but it also leaves us with Frankie as a deeply tormented,
‘lost’ man. It is a measure of the film that it doesn’t try to assuage our
moral qualms about Frankie’s final actions or to condemn our possible
sympathy for them. It simply leaves us in a position without clear answers,
and where, unusually, you might even find yourself watching all of the
credits, listening to the slow piano-chord soundtrack, trying to come to
terms with everything that just happened.