Million Dollar Baby is streaming on fuboTV and Paramount Plus Premium in the US, and on Prime Video in the UK and Australia. Calling a Best Picture winner a hidden gem is a stretch, except that this one has genuinely slipped out of circulation. People remember what it is about. Very few people have actually watched it this decade.
The source material explains most of what is good about it. Paul Haggis adapted stories from Rope Burns, a collection by F.X. Toole, which was the pen name of Jerry Boyd, a fight manager and cutman who worked in gyms for decades and did not publish fiction until late in life. That is an unusual provenance for a studio drama, and it is all over the film. The gym runs like a workplace. The fights are administrative as much as athletic. Nobody explains boxing to anybody, because everyone in the room already knows how it works.
Clint Eastwood directed it, produced it, wrote the score and plays the trainer, and the restraint is the real achievement. He shoots in deep shadow with almost no coverage, lets scenes run long and flat, and declines nearly every opportunity to underline a moment. It holds a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, though the number undersells how unfashionable this kind of filmmaking already was.
Hilary Swank trained hard enough to pick up a serious infection midway through the shoot and kept it from Eastwood rather than lose days. That is a good story, but the performance is the point. She plays ambition as a kind of relentless politeness, asking for a chance so persistently that refusing starts to look like the strange behavior.
Two hours and twelve minutes, and it earns the length. Go in knowing only that it is a film about a trainer and a fighter, and let it do the rest. That is exactly how it was built to work.
