By Armond White

MILLION DOLLAR BABY

DIRECTED BY CLINT EASTWOOD

SPANGLISH

DIRECTED BY JAMES L. BROOKS

IGNORANCE MIGHT BEGIN to explain why anyone would think Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby is a masterpiece. But to be sympathetic, it is a specific culturally bred ignorance, resulting from the unfortunate way movies have been divided between art and Hollywood. Eastwood's misleadingly titled drama shares a far from happy theme with Patrice Chéreau's Son Frère but takes the easy approach—easy for American moviegoers to convince themselves it's good.

How people who are emotionally close stumble within their relationships while individually struggling to survive—and face death—is a worthy topic. Getting at these themes through genre short cuts, Eastwood affects a certain mythos that some critics overrate as the essence of American storytelling (and in preference to a low-key, unhyped European film like Son Frère). Million Dollar Baby uses the old boxing-movie conceit that pairs a young upstart (Hilary Swank) with an old pug (Eastwood). Its creakiness recalls the sentimental 1940 City for Conquest or even Rocky V (the one with the brash protege) much more than a recent film like Walter Hill's probing, politically conscious boxing movie Undisputed. This doesn't mean that Eastwood commands the plangent emotionality of City for Conquest, nor that he is a modern classicist. It just proves that he thinks in simplistic terms that actually deny modern political complications.

Eastwood plays the lead role of Frankie Dunn, an Irish American loner who ran away from his family responsibilities and now, in his senior cynicism, owns a run-down inner-city gym. Frankie becomes the trainer of Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), a poor white waitress in her 30s who wants to box her way out of poverty and shame before it's too late. Their story includes Scrap, Frankie's wizened, regretful old black sidekick (played by Morgan Freeman, of course). It's all so hoary and predictable that when director Eastwood eventually swings his left hook, gullible viewers are caught unawares. They respond inordinately, as if they'd just seen a ghost.

It's the ghost of bogus Hollywood uplift. Here, Eastwood and screenwriter Paul Haggis translate it into bathos. But what Eastwood proposes as the nature of human sorrow is exactly the sappiness that Chéreau's precise, quotidian brother-love story bravely avoided. Movie culture goes rank when a great film like Son Frère is ignored. Chéreau broke past the barrier of AIDS sanctimony and strengthened understanding (about the disease, homophobia and family relations) but only for the lucky few who saw his film. Son Frère got to the heart of family tension; the brothers' rivalry was a tough, clear concentration of the way people complexly subsist in society. Eastwood's boxing metaphor ("Boxing is about respect—getting it for yourself and taking it away from the other guy") sentimentalizes social competition. It uses tough-guy terms that people have romanticized from old movies and that, frankly, become "cute" when the pugilist is a chick—especially a girl who brings out Frankie's hidden fatherly feelings.

There's a self-congratulatory dishonesty in Million Dollar Baby that flatters the prejudices of people who condescended to Meg Ryan's skillful boxing-manager characterization in Against the Ropes. Eastwood doesn't credibly build to his grave conclusion; it's a narrative trick that pretends to profundity. Because Eastwood has been operating in familiar, formulaic territory, when he finally does throw his left hook, some viewers will think the clichés have been deepened. Fact is, they've merely been stretched taut. Worst of all, Eastwood's clichés depend upon reworking class condescension into moral righteousness. Million Dollar Baby will only seem tragic (rather than bathetic) to those gullible Eastwood boosters who were eager to believe that the meretricious Mystic River was a worthy Bush-era bookend to On the Waterfront.

In both these contemporary-set poor man's pseudo-tragedies, Eastwood depicts working-class life with a rich man's whimsy. Everything is dirtier, more fancifully foul than necessary (from Maggie scavenging half-eaten diner meals to Scrap sleeping in a room just off the smelly gymnasium). Eastwood seems to disdain the lower class rather than truly empathize with how misfortune hardens people. This disdain comes out when Frankie, flat on her back, shows the gumption to cuss out her abusive mother and kin: "I'll sell that house from under your fat lazy, hillbilly ass." (Middle-brow Americans everywhere are encouraged to applaud.) The movie is precise about class only when it is derisive.

Most of the time Million Dollar Baby walks a thin line, usually through Morgan Freeman's Shawshank Redemption-style narration. ("Some wounds are too deep and too close to the bone, and no matter what you do you can't stop the bleeding.") Admittedly, there's rapport between Eastwood and Freeman; these old guys growl together almost musically. And Swank does a baby-girl act that makes her cozying up to gnarly Clint kinda sweet. American movies usually relish the violent interaction this film starts with, so that the vulnerability Eastwood finally reveals in his characters feels decent. (Frankie has a running conflict with his stern Irish priest—a cliché so outdated it is positively brave in the anti-Christian year when The Passion of the Christ is excoriated.) So then why does Million Dollar Baby's tear-jerking wallop seem so manipulative?

Unlike Son Frère, the fact of loss is never an acknowledged, philosophical issue. ("Anybody can lose a fight," Snap encourages a retarded gym groupie.) An Old Hollywood master like Frank Borzage frequently made death an entry to a higher level of being and understanding. With Eastwood, the jolt is unearned; it's merely an effect. Eastwood doesn't start going for broke until the final half-hour, when the film suddenly becomes literally darker—a series of nearly monochrome images and silhouettes. It's stylistically bold, but hollow. I was more fascinated by Eastwood's physiognomy; his laconic style now has a naturally rough, wrinkled face to go with it. His close-ups are not vain but actorly, in a good sense. He looks like a sculpture carved to commemorate mortality. Maybe Eastwood, unlike his idolators, did in fact, see Son Frère; its truth shows in his skin. But Million Dollar Baby is all surface. Its climax is a sucker punch.

JAMES L. BROOKS has never made a great movie, but his tv work (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Simpsons) certifies that he is, indeed, a master of the pop idiom. At the movies, Brooks' inventions are always touching (Terms of Endearment) and clever (I'll Do Anything, As Good as It Gets) even when they are downright deceitful (Broadcast News). But Brooks' new film Spanglish is the first that tempts me to use the "M" word. He combines sitcom facility with a subversive view of the Southern California lifestyle that typically produces mendacious sitcoms. It comes very close to being a masterpiece.

As the title suggests, Spanglish is about class and ethnic mismatches. A beautiful young Mexican illegal immigrant, Flor (Paz Vega), works as a maid for a well-off white family in Malibu, the Claskys (Adam Sandler, Téa Leoni, Cloris Leachman and a couple kids). It's almost profound because Brooks doesn't simply treat the situation as jokey. Fact is, Spanglish is the most emotionally and politically inquiring film to open here since Mike Leigh's Vera Drake. Yes, high praise. And that's the contradiction of the very manipulative yet truly trenchant Spanglish.

Brooks doesn't venture to dramatize an insurmountable social circumstance. He dares to examine what most rich Hollywoodians take for granted: the emotional lives of the people who cook their dinners, watch their kids, clean their pools. Flor walks into a household that keeps ugly prejudice at bay yet is so rife with insecurity and the dehumanization of wealth that it nearly threatens her own well-being by the most insidious of effects—class temptation.

It's hard to think of a tougher movie scene than the one where single mother Paz watches her daughter enjoying the Clasky family's easy beach life yet observing her mother being servile. It goes to the root of American complication. (It has that weight of privilege that makes the final scene of the Iranian film The Deserted Station unforgettable.) When the daughter Cristina (Aimee Garcia), who narrates the film, first sees the Malibu riches and talks about "natural beauty that is privately owned. I didn't know God had a toy store for the rich," Spanglish gets to the heart of politics and envy. Clint Eastwood isn't nearly so sensitive. James Brooks is some kind of comic genius. o