I was underwhelmed by Million Dollar Baby. There are all sorts of aesthetic gripes (and praises) one could parse, but one thing about the film that annoyed me was its dodgy class-regional politics. On the one hand, Maggie/Hilary Swank’s poor upbringing serves as guarantor of her integrity and goodness. On the other hand, we have to put up with an absurd Texas bumpkin (Danger) who gets his subject-verb agreement wrong in ways that strike me as highly improbable and whose accent serves as shorthand for the character’s idiocy. (It could be that the character is developmentally challenged, but I’m not sure the film makes that clear rather than imply a generalized quality of Texas rednecks). What’s worse, Maggie’s hillbilly families are sheer caricatures of evil. Is it not possible to show a dysfunctional family where one understands, if not agree with, why parents or children do bad things?
By chance, I’d just also seen Jim McKay’s Everyday People, a modest film about the closing of a Brooklyn diner and the effect on its mostly black staff and patrons. The film had slipped beneath the radar screen as his films often do (thanks to Chuck Tryon for pointing out to me that McKay even had a film out this year!). Compare and contrast between two such different films might not be fair, but McKay offers an understanding of class politics at odds with the patronizing gaze of Million Dollar Baby. Aesthetically, his films aren’t knockout - they adopt the tableau compositions and deliberate editing pace so popular in American independent film since Jarmusch (the montages of Brooklyn street scenes border on cliche). Instead of being a formal exercise, Everyday People foregrounds the improvisation of the actors and a narrative openness meant to capture political indeterminacy. Each of the characters is a soundpiece for some stake in urban culture, gentrification or blackness, yet it’s clear that none of them offer the truth. They simply offer an insight from their social position, while others point out the flaws in the worldview. The film’s sympathies lie with the anti-gentrification argument yet the film’s end offers no closure that would vindicate any answer to the conflicts of the film.
And beyond the talky, social problem bent of the film, there are moments that are affecting in meatier ways than the pathos of the hospital power-of-attorney scene in Million Dollar Baby. One of my favorite is a counterside conversation between a foster child and a man estranged from his children after leaving them for a number of years. Characters act badly but are no less human for it.
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