The ethics of allowing someone to die are thorny enough in their own right, but they are not the ethics of assisted suicide. The doctors would then have to decide what to do. She would ask to be allowed to die, not be killed. Instead, she would ask her doctor and nurses to shut off her ventilator. But in the real world she would not make such a request of her friend. Maggie asks her trainer, Eastwood, to help her die. police or simple-minded, talk-show hosts think it is. There is one glaring problem in the film, but it is not what the P.C. That said, how well does the movie actually do when it comes to depicting these issues? And that is a very good use of cinema, one that ought to be celebrated not denigrated.Ĭlearly it is not beyond the ethical pale to ask questions about living with a devastating disability and what a person of faith and conscience would do when confronted with a request for help from a person in such a state. It is using the medium to explore some very tough ethical questions. But some people, stricken with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), devastating spinal cord injuries, end-stage cystic fibrosis and massive strokes that leave their bodies useless, do not.ĭealing with quality of life decisions about these devastating forms of disability in a thoughtful way - in a movie, book or theatrical presentation - is not selling any kind of value message about disability or, for that matter, promoting a particular ideological agenda. Christopher Reeve, who I know contemplated suicide many times, decided to live on despite his paralysis. Nor is there only one right answer to severe disability. His conscience and his Catholicism make mercy killing ethically off-limits. She asks Frankie, who has become her closest friend and a surrogate father, if he will kill her. Paralyzed, bed-bound and permanently on a ventilator that pushes air through a tube in her throat, Maggie decides that her life is no longer worth living. The older pro cheap-shots Maggie after the bell rings and she falls, breaking her neck. Maggie goes after the championship title against a tough, veteran boxer who is willing to do anything to win. What has made the movie controversial is the twist it takes at the end. She is played with great poignancy by Swank. It is a fine movie that offers a touching view of an evolving relationship between an aging fight manager and trainer, Frankie Dunn, played to the hilt as a craggy, old-school grouch by Eastwood, and Maggie Fitzgerald, a late-to-the-game, white-trash girl who has seized upon boxing as her ticket to self-satisfaction. It has received seven Academy Award nominations including best picture. "Million Dollar Baby," starring Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman, has already won a variety of honors. If you don’t want to know the ending, then read no further. One small niggle - Swank's white-trash family is too cartoonishly awful to convince - otherwise, this is well-nigh perfect.Second warning: The ending of the movie "Million Dollar Baby" is revealed. It's bittersweet, juggling both extremes with rare skill, and its washed-out noir look makes it stand out visually, too. For platonic love, it goes way beyond Lost in Translation without ever seeming surreal or stagey. Two old codgers outgruffing each other in the murk might be too much of a good thing but for the perfect foil of Hilary Swank's ready smile and miraculous freshness as the trainee boxer.Īll three richly deserve their Oscars and in its buttoned-up way, Million Dollar Baby has some of the most affectingly emotion I've seen onscreen in ages. Freeman gets the narrator role - a sparely written wry look back marinated in the philosophy of boxing and adapted from FX Toole's stories. Also as with Unforgiven, Eastwood gets a perfect partner in gruffness in Morgan Freeman, his partner at a seedy, rundown boxing gym.Įastwood's rasp here sounds a lot like his only screen impersonation - as a virtual John Huston in White Hunter, Black Heart - and fits another typically pig-headed obsessive. It may well be his swansong as an actor-director and, like the best films from the grand old man, it's pared to the bone to give us the very essence of its three memorable central characters. This is next in line from the last great Eastwood movie, Unforgiven, and equally uncompromising. C lint Eastwood treats us to the sort of magisterial gloom that we've come to associate with his best pictures.
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