- #LUCIA RIJKER MILLION DOLLAR BABY MOVIE#
- #LUCIA RIJKER MILLION DOLLAR BABY PROFESSIONAL#
- #LUCIA RIJKER MILLION DOLLAR BABY TV#
#LUCIA RIJKER MILLION DOLLAR BABY MOVIE#
Gorgeously photographed by Mystic River's Tom Stern in thick blocks of shadow and light, the movie has the look of a Forties noir and the well-thumbed sentiment of an old man's life. Million Dollar Baby is a love story in the purest sense, a connection of outcasts who find in each other what they can't find elsewhere. This won't appeal to everyone Hollywood has trained us to expect every stop on the narrative highway clearly signposted and it's easy to forget that what we get out of a movie largely depends on what we bring to it.
#LUCIA RIJKER MILLION DOLLAR BABY TV#
The screenplay, by the talented Paul Haggis, whose 1996 TV drama EZ Streets remains the most interesting cancelled show of the last decade, blithely cuts corners and encourages the audience to fill in the blanks. The expected rhythms of the underdog film, the familiar emotional cues of melodrama are present, but only up to a point.
Believe me, you don't.Įconomical to a fault, Million Dollar Baby is a movie where formulas don't apply. And as the training sequences are replaced by girlfights and injuries and lessons learned, you may think you know where this film is going. Then he relents, impressed by her desperation and refusal to back down. "I don't train girls," he snaps, pointing out that at 31, she's too old to train anyway. When a white trash waitress named Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) starts hanging around the gym pestering Frankie to train her, he brushes her off. Whatever Frankie is praying for, his God isn't answering. And we know he goes to Mass, frequently and hopelessly, lingering afterwards for an angry, ongoing dialogue with his patient priest (Brian O'Byrne). We know he feels responsible for the fight that led to Scrap's partial loss of sight. We learn that Frankie has a daughter he writes to every week and for 23 years the letters have found their way back to him unopened. It's to the film's credit that these tragedies are alluded to rather than explained, little snippets of back story dropped into the narrative exactly where they're most needed. Best friend and gym manager Eddie "Scrap-Iron" Dupris (Morgan Freeman) no longer tries to intervene he knows Frankie's aversion to risk is an organic thing, an immune reaction to his own tragedies. Frankie also manages young boxing hopefuls, only to lose them to more aggressive managers when his over-protectiveness keeps them from the title fights their careers demand.
#LUCIA RIJKER MILLION DOLLAR BABY PROFESSIONAL#
Eastwood plays Frankie Dunn, a professional trainer and the owner of a ramshackle gym in downtown LA.
But while insider power has greased the path of many a substandard movie, Eastwood's Baby is a tour de force of stark, pared-to-the-bone craftsmanship.īased on an anthology of short stories by the late fight manager and "cut man" Jerry Boyd (writing as FX Toole), Million Dollar Baby is a boxing movie the way Bull Durham is a baseball movie, which is to say, only incidentally. And it's probably fair to say that Million Dollar Baby, in its present form, might never have seen the inside of a cinema without the considerable clout of director/star Clint Eastwood. It's not often a film from a major studio dares to deny its characters redemption or hope or even spiritual sustenance.