Million Dollar Baby

This is an extract from a longer piece.

Maggie idealizes a family that, in reality, cares very little about her. Unable—or perhaps unwilling—to confront that painful truth, she romanticizes both her family and her past. The moment when that illusion finally collapses is devastating. The disbelief in her eyes and voice when she looks at her mother and asks, “What happened to you, Mama?” lands like the silence after an argument. In that instant, the illusions of childhood and fairy-tale endings dissolve.

We all see the world, to some degree, through the stories we have constructed about it. Removing those rose-colored glasses can reveal a reality we would rather not confront. Yet Million Dollar Baby suggests that seeing people as they are, however painful, may ultimately be more sustaining than living within our fantasies. Maggie is capable of making that transition.

Frankie Dunn is not.

Frankie’s guilt and his inability to forgive himself over his relationship with his own daughter deepen his attachment to Maggie, who gradually becomes a surrogate daughter. Yet instead of allowing this new relationship to release him from the past, he remains bound to it. He keeps all his daughter’s returned letters in a box in his hallway closet, perhaps preserving the fantasy that someday—at his funeral, perhaps, or when she comes to empty his house—she will finally read them.

It is easier for Frankie to cling to the belief that, if only he had done something differently, he might somehow change the past than to accept the present as it is. Maggie eventually confronts reality; Frankie continues bargaining with it. By failing to forgive either himself or his daughter, he remains attached to the hope that someday their relationship will become what he wants it to be. We sense, even if he cannot, that it never will. Denial is a powerful thing.

Frankie uses these defenses to protect himself from pain, but they also prevent him from forgiving himself—for what he believes he has done to others, including Eddie “Scrap-Iron” Dupris (Morgan Freeman), and for what he believes his daughter’s rejection says about the kind of man he is.

In this sense, Million Dollar Baby may be the Eastwood film that most deserves the title Unforgiven.

Ultimately, the only letter Frankie’s daughter may ever read is the one Scrap writes to her—the letter that, through his narration, has been telling us Frankie’s story all along. And, of course, it is the only one worth reading.