Despite his grace and precision as a director, Clint Eastwood, like Martin Scorsese, is at the mercy of his scripts. But in Million Dollar Baby he’s got a terrific one, adapted by Paul Haggis from Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner.
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I can’t think of many things I’m less drawn to than boxing. Million Dollar Baby tends to view it as neither an especially interesting sport nor a metaphor for something else (as Raging Bull does), but rather as a particularly acute form of savagery in a savage world. “Boxing is about respect,” Scrap observes early on, “getting it for yourself and taking it away from the other guy.” Yet unlike Raging Bull‘s Jake LaMotta, Maggie shows few signs of vengefulness or spite. She merely wants to make her mark in a world where she’s long been labeled trailer trash.
Apart from that, we know little about her past or about Frankie’s, and one of this movie’s triumphs is that it says as much as it does despite minimizing its backstories and offscreen space. The performances of the three leads are perfect, so we don’t care that we don’t know what lies right outside the Hit Pit. Unlike most other Eastwood films, this one has no sex, depicted or remembered. We know Frankie has a daughter and that he writes her every week, but the letters are all returned and we never learn anything else about her. We also know nothing about her mother. When we belatedly get an account of how Scrap lost his eye and how Frankie was involved, this information almost feels like a glut. We learn more about Frankie’s troubled Catholicism (he habitually attends mass and has an ongoing dialogue with a priest afterward) and his nurturing of his Irish roots (he studies Gaelic and reads Yeats) than we do about his everyday life, especially before he agrees to train Maggie. We never learn how Maggie spent her 20s. And the two glimpses of Maggie’s mother and some of her other family members may be more than we care to know.
Logan and Scorsese held my attention for all 169 minutes—through the comic extravaganza of Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) blowing a wad on his first talkie (the 1930 Hell’s Angels), the spectacle of his building and flying planes while romancing all the pretty ladies in sight, and his intrigues as he defies and outwits corporate entities larger than his own, such as MGM, TWA, and the U.S. government. But then the movie concludes with Hughes repeating the phrase “the wave of the future” like a broken record, and I couldn’t figure out whether Logan and Scorsese were trying to illustrate a Hughes tic I hadn’t heard about, evoke the specter of future multicorporate takeovers, or simply distract the audience from its questions.
The Aviator focuses on the early adulthood of Hughes—”during his scrappy years from the late 1920s to late 1940s,” as one piece of infotainment puts it, “when he fought the Hollywood establishment and pushed bounds on sex and violence in film, dated parades of starlets, and oversaw creation of the world’s biggest and fastest planes.” I was disappointed that it stopped just before Hughes took over the RKO studio and revealed contradictory aspects of his right-wing politics. He assigned several RKO directors a film called I Married a Communist in the late 40s and early 50s as a test of their patriotism, figuring that anyone who turned the project down was automatically suspect. Yet he also protected a leading Hollywood radical, Nicholas Ray, from being blacklisted so that Ray could patch up several Hughes features. But my ideal Hughes biopic isn’t Scorsese’s, which, as the title suggests, is mainly about the man’s obsession with planes—and about the wealth, power, and glamour of the youthful Charles Foster Kane.
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by Paul Haggis
With Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Hilary Swank, Jay Baruchel, and Mike Colter
The Aviator ★★★ (A must-see)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by John Logan
With Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Alec Baldwin, Alan Alda, John C. Reilly, Kate Beckinsale, Adam Scott, and Ian Holm
