Increasingly, it seems that there is Million Dollar Exercise Review very weak central region in American motion pictures between the extremes of diogenic nihility and fatuitous raise, as if filmmaking were a hawser with, temper, Quentin Tarantino at one end and Ron Howard at the other. Million Dollar Baby escapes that continuity birthday suit, however. It is an totally sincere and animated work, but one destitute of all the usual, reinsure bromides. Not only is there no remove for Maggie, there is no redemption for Frankie, no inspirit to be found in other friendships or solace in the cognizance that he has done the just thing.
It is on this last step that many of the politic broadsides against the film's "pro-mercy-killing" embassage seem to me to rather signorina the evidence. Yes, Frankie honors Maggie's wish to vanish, and placet, this is presented as the "direct" appurtenances to do--insofar as such a water could potentially be under the circumstances. But, probable everything else in the membrane, it comes with a precipice excellence.
Like Will Munney in Unforgiven, Frankie does what he does in the full knowledge that it will cost him his soul, and that afterwards he will never be able to rejoin behavior fellowship. (As I've literal elsewhere, it's ironic that Unforgiven has been interpret as anti-vigilantism and Million Dollar Baby as plus-mercy-killing, even though the two follow a nearly selfsame swoop.) Million Dollar Baby may not have been the best pellicle of last year. (For my money that would have been this or this.) But for all its faults, it is a complete and serious film by a director belatedly coming into his full powers, a prompt that even in Hollywood there is an alternative to empty irony and emotional hackery.
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