Million Dollar Baby vs The Silence Of The Lambs

Million Dollar Baby takes what is essentially a fable, with characters we think we've met before, and a theme we could recite in our sleep, and turns it into a wrenching character study. It's a story of love and death and fighting. It's about regrets and friendships and keeping promises. It's dirty, shadowy, quiet, gritty, intensely sad and at times surprisingly funny. It's like Leaving Las Vegas on protein bars. It's like a two hour Tom Waits song. I think it's the best movie of 2004.

Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) is a “cut man”. You've seen them during matches. A cut man is the guy with cotton swabs and Vaseline and that little metal piece you wear over your knuckles. He pushes cheekbones and squeezes eyes and straightens noses. Frankie's job, you see, is just to stop the bleeding. The pain, and the actual injury, has to run its course. He helps you finish the fight, and then it's up to you and your doctor. Frankie's been doing that for himself for years, shuffling in to work at the gym, and to mass every day. He has contentious relationships with the only two constants in his life: Scrap (Morgan Freeman), a former boxer and current gym janitor; and Frankie's priest (Brian O'Byrne), an otherwise patient man with no room for Frankie's sarcastic post-mass questions. Frankie is still a respected trainer, though fewer and fewer of the boxers using his gym actually want him to manage them. He's got one potential prize-fighter, but Frankie keeps putting off the bigger matches. It's easy to imagine Frankie's gym going on like this forever, with the same guys coming in to work the bag or skip rope, day after day, with no one ever actually boxing professionally. And then Maggie walks in. Frankie has met her after a recent fight; she was in the female match that preceded the main bout. Frankie doesn't watch the girls' fights, and he doesn't train girls either. But Maggie is there, every day, calling Frankie “Boss” and trying to work the bag. Out of frustration, or maybe to prove her wrong and send her packing, Frankie agrees to train Maggie. We know, because we've been to the movies, that Frankie and Maggie will bond over their new common goal. We also know that Maggie will be a natural, and will have highs and lows in her career. There is much that we don't know, however, and part of the wonder of Million Dollar Baby is letting those revelations come to light. Frankie, Scrap and Maggie create a family of sorts, where they had none before, but hard lives, as Million Dollar Baby could tell you, aren't likely to be just suddenly turn easy.

Clint Eastwood directs Million Dollar Baby in an understated, to-the-point manner that serves the story well. Nothing is flashier than it has to be; shots often composed with simple shifts in shadows and light, and the fights have a visceral in-the-ring quality (the fights themselves seem alarmingly authentic. Maggie takes hits that look crazy real, and when she knocks out her opponents—which she does often—they drop like rag dolls). Likewise, Eastwood gives a performance of subtly and strength. His Frankie is not just gruff-yet-loveable; he's fighting demons of his own, and doesn't want to repeat old mistakes. And Morgan Freeman is just so Morgan Freeman I can hardly stand it. He's funny and wise, as Morgan Freeman characters often are, but he's flawed, sad and angry as well. He narrates the film, as he did The Shawshank Redemption, and his voice isn't intrusive or obvious, but rather insightful and comforting. And as Maggie, who always goes for the knock-out in the first round, saves pennies to buy a speedbag, and breaks my heart, we have Hilary Swank.

In a recent Newsweek interview, Hilary Swank said she hates being asked when she's going to play a “pretty girl”. What does that mean? Should she make one of those movies about the President's daughter on vacation? Or maybe she could play a clumsy assistant editor, or a socialite babysitter? It probably seems like Swank only goes butch, playing tough cookies and jocks, and, you know, boys. Good. We need way more actresses unafraid to be tough, smart and brave. There's plenty of giggling girls and shrinking violets to go around. But who's going to be our next Kathy Bates, or Frances McDormand, or Sigourney Weaver, or Jodie Foster? Hilary Swank is probably not surprising casting in the role of a female boxer. As Maggie Fitzgerald, however, Swank plays more than just a female boxer. Maggie is desperate, hopeful and determined. She's past her prime, athletically, but with waiting tables her only other skill, she pushes forward. Maggie has barely any past or family to speak of, and her only future is one of stealing table scraps and rolling coins. Boxing isn't just a metaphor for Maggie; it's literally all she's got. In Swank's hands, Maggie becomes fully human, but perhaps beyond that even. She feels not only like a real person, but a real person we could swear we've heard of before. Surely Maggie Fitzgerald is some legend lost in the annals of sports history. It's a beauty of a performance, with Swank nailing every single emotion, every single beat, every single punch. She doesn't just hold her own with Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman, she demands that they hold their own with her. Swank might not be at her prettiest as Maggie, but she's a fucking knockout in every other conceivable way, and days later, I'm still haunted by a scene of her alone in the car with her trainer, talking about her dog. I can scarcely think of any of Hilary's peers who can do that, or will conceivably be doing that anytime soon. Hilary, you can dress up for the Oscars. Keep it real in movies, and I'm there.

On the surface, the model for Million Dollar Baby would seem to be a movie like Rocky, or maybe even Seabiscuit. But with its dark sets, life and death themes, and its plucky Midwestern girl among giants, I think of Million Dollar Baby as a cinematic cousin to The Silence of the Lambs.

Like Hilary Swank, Jodie Foster has made a career of dodging the roles her peers can't get enough of. Unfortunately, this means we don't get to see her much, but once in a while, we get something like The Silence of the Lambs.

You know the drill. Even if you haven't watched The Silence of the Lambs since it first came out, you've no doubt seen Se7en, Copycat, Kiss the Girls, Switchback, Along Came a Spider, Hannibal, The Bone Collector, The Cell, In Dreams, Red Dragon, Murder By Numbers, In the Cut, Suspect Zero, Taking Lives, C.S.I., Law and Order: SVU, The X-Files, Crossing Jordan, or Profiler, and on many of those occasions, you might have noticed something was missing. What's missing in The Silence of the Lambs is what's great about it. Dr. Chilton shows Clarice a picture of what Dr. Lecter did to his nurse, and we see her reaction, and imagine what kind of horrors she's seeing. In Hannibal, we get a flashback scene showing exactly what he did, and instead of the imagined horrors, we get the actual gore, and it's just gross instead of scary. The Silence of the Lambs, under Jonathan Demme's direction, keeps this tactic up for most of the movie, letting us fill in the blanks. Clarice steps into an elevator full of tall men, and we feel uneasy. She slides under the door of an abandoned storage shed, and we prepare for the worst.

The true greatness of The Silence of the Lambs, of course, is in the interplay between Foster, Scott Glen and Anthony Hopkins, who didn't yet know that Hannibal Lecter was a movie star. They make a nice mirror to the characters of Million Dollar Baby, with Clarice Starling simply Maggie Fitzgerald in a different line of work. Clarice is in a line of work where no one expects a woman, let alone one who excels. She's being set up a little by her boss, and humored by pretty much everyone else. But she's there, confounding expectations at every turn. There's not as much sadness in The Silence of the Lambs as in Million Dollar Baby, but there's that same sense of the events at hand being necessary, of them being significant in the lives of the characters, who have lived to this point without each other, but from now on might wonder how.

Million Dollar Baby: A
The Silence of the Lambs: A