Million Dollar Baby

Starring: Hilary Swank, Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Jay Baruchel, Christina Cox

Directed by: Clint Eastwood

RS: 3.5of 4 Stars

2004 Warner Bros. Pictures Drama

At seventy-four, Clint Eastwood is enjoying a second championship season. Last year he directed Mystic River and gave the piece a tragic poetry that seeps into Million Dollar Baby, a stunningly drawn map of the human heart disguised as a boxing yarn. Adapted by Paul Haggis from a story in the F.X. Toole collection, Rope Burns, this emotional wallop of a movie focuses on Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), an uneducated waitress from the Ozarks who thinks she can be a fighter. Her dream brings her to the L.A. gym of Frankie Dunn (Eastwood), a fight trainer and cut man (he staunches the flow of blood during a match) with zero patience for female warriors ("girlie tough is not enough"). He tells Maggie, 31, that she's too old to begin. The one person who thinks otherwise is Frankie's pal Scrap (the ever-magnificent Morgan Freeman), an ex-boxer who lost an eye in a fight for which Frankie was cut man. If you smell a setup for Rocky rah-rah, you don't know Eastwood. Even when calamity climbs in the ring and the script flirts with teary cliches (Maggie has an exploitative family, Frankie has an estranged daughter), Eastwood -- a true film artist -- never pummels you. Swank delivers the goods with ferocity and feeling. And the prickly Eastwood-Freeman rapport is a joy. But the knockout punch comes from Eastwood. His stripped-down performance -- as powerful as anything he's ever done -- has a rugged, haunting beauty. The same goes for the movie.