Directed by: Clint Eastwood
Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures
Written by Rudolph Lambert Fernandez
100/100
Washed-out boxer Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) has ducked and dodged greatness as a trainer-manager for years. His wards adore his bob-and-weave smarts, but suspect that his peevish overprotectiveness, his nagging fear holds them back from coveted titles. In protecting them from a shot at success, is he shielding himself from failure? Is he lingering too long in the neutral corner, fussing too much with speed bags and mitts and tape and gauze? If his teaching style is one prolonged defensive clinch, how then, are they to throw that metaphorical offensive punch? His better wards are too ambitious, or too impatient, to stick around.
Out of nowhere, a beleaguered Frankie gets another shot. A rookie, Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) wants him, and him alone, to train and manage her. She’s been scraping dishes and waitressing for a living, but figures boxing stardom is her ticket to the kind of respect that’s eluded her. She won’t quit badgering him, just because he doesn’t “train girls.” Frankie’s gym assistant, another washed-out boxer Eddie Dupris (Morgan Freeman) referees, as it were, this sapping multi-round battle of wills. As Frankie relents, Maggie’s bond with him grows beyond boxing, “You remind me of my Daddy.” Frankie becomes a proxy for the affection that Maggie’s missed since her father died, she a proxy for his long-estranged daughter.
Maggie’s no spring chicken, just a spring; coiled and ready to strike. Nothing “but guts” starting out, in barely a year-and-a-half she’s a contender for the world welterweight title. Gentle in the gym, she’s a monster in matches, pummeling her way up, from four-rounders to six-rounders, lightweight to welterweight, winning with an ease that rattles rivals everywhere. Edinburgh, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Vegas. Once their faces meet her “goodnight hook,” they’re down, they’re out.
Then, a body blow. In a “million dollar” title match, Maggie faces down a brutal rival who’s used to playing outside the rules. Battered, broken, bedridden, Maggie’s about to lose everything she’s won. Frankie must now salvage victory from what looks like certain defeat. He’s used to doubling up as her cutsman, but these cuts seem too deep, even for her, for him.
Everything in boxing is backwards
Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece is about finding a win in every other loss, victory, in almost every defeat, life, even when surrounded by death. Movingly, Eastwood, Freeman (also narrator) and Swank circle each other in an emotional ring of their own making, surprising you with an uppercut, just when you think you’ve got it all figured out.
Expertly, Eastwood uses light and shadow to reinforce the play between not just left hook and right, but between the to-and-fro of life: cowardice-courage, dream-reality, success-failure, life-death. A curtain of darkness cloaks his characters, but a beam of light keeps punching through, reminding them of what they’re fighting for and why.
Frankie’s one eye is on teaching his boxers to wield their bodies, his other is on elevating their minds. Hard on the outside, soft on the inside, he kneels when praying each night for his daughter. He’s at Mass every day, not just on Sundays, playfully sparring with the local priest on the finer points of church doctrine. He takes a jab at learning Gaelic, if nothing else to understand his favorite poet, the Irishman W. B. Yeats.
As if in visual tribute to Yeats’s poem, An Acre of Grass, Eastwood seeps his film in green. Bright green, pale green, deep green, rich green, dark green, faded green: Frankie’s and Maggie’s T-shirts and jackets, Maggie’s boxing cloak and shorts in her title match, the priest’s vestments. Eastwood doesn’t show you much grass. But, oh, there’s so much green.
In his poem, Yeats reflects on age and mortality, “Grant me an old man’s frenzy, Myself must I remake.” As if on cue, Frankie’s remaking himself through Maggie, shadowboxing from the sidelines, while she downs rivals in the ring.
Frankie’s initial rebuke, “I don’t train girls,” is not so much an answer to Maggie’s pleading, it’s more like a life statement capturing his belief about where violence, righteous or not, belongs: with men. But violence finds a way of embracing women, whether Frankie likes it or not. And some of them embrace it right back. Not for love, but for redemption. Maggie doesn’t relish fighting itself, it’s the afterglow of respect that she thirsts.
The slip of a guy, the simpleton Danger Barch (Jay Baruchel) who unwittingly aspires to be a champion boxer, serves as a decoy. Like Maggie, he’s fragile; in his case, too fragile to even enter the women’s ring. Still, he dreams beyond his weight “class.” Maggie too dreams that boxing will lift her out of her “class” from poverty into comfort, if not affluence, from shame into respectability.
A gym poster on the wall behind Maggie’s punching bag says, “Winners are simply willing to do what losers won’t.”
It’s not what losers don’t do that matters, it’s what they won’t.
Sure, losing is a part of life. But failure, Eastwood’s saying, is not just being beaten beneath the floodlights of a ring, it’s turning away from the light and life itself: the real KO. That’s a denial of the uniquely human capacity to change. Frankie’s first adamant, he won’t train girls. He ends up training one anyway. He doesn’t rush his wards into the big league. After Maggie develops a habit of KOs, he pitches her into the spotlight.
Frankie may be teaching Maggie boxing but it’s Eddie who teaches Frankie about life. He’s the one reminding Frankie not to nurse regrets, as they together watch Maggie, so paralyzed she has to be fed air through a tube, “You made her the best fighter she could be.” As she starts to lose nearly everything from the indignity of a hospital bed, Maggie too reminds an inconsolable Frankie, “I seen the world. People chanted my name. I was in magazines. You think I ever dreamed that’d happen?”
Eddie sees more with his one eye than most people do with two. He lets on that it was Frankie who’d been his cutsman, back when Eddie could go all the rounds and then some. One gash on Eddie’s face had opened so wide, blood gushed into his eye. Feelingly, he says, “They should have stopped the fight, but hell, I was a black man in San Bernardino, blood was what I was there for.” Eddie kept demanding Frankie patch him up, Frankie kept wanting to ring the bell but couldn’t; he wasn’t Eddie’s manager. Next morning, Eddie lost his eye. In years Frankie hasn’t said a word about it, but Eddie knows that Frankie blames himself for pushing forward, when he should’ve been pulling back. That stayed with Frankie, the pulling back, that is: inside, outside.
Boxing mythologists love to toss around the title “undefeated.” Of course there’s no such thing. Not one that lasts anyway. Eddie once plays back Frankie’s advice to Maggie, “to move left, you don’t step left, you push on the right toe.”
That’s a call to face, not flee, pain and loss; instead of running from it, “you step into it.” Eddie echoes Frankie again, “Everything in boxing is backwards. Sometimes…best way to deliver a punch is to step back…but step back too far…you ain’t fightin at all.” There is a point beyond which feint becomes funk. Frankie’s overly guarded mentoring of Maggie resembles that, until he heeds his own advice. Then, she’s no longer held back, she soars.
Rudolph Lambert Fernandez is an independent writer writing on pop culture.
Twitter: @RudolphFernandz