I saw this movie tonight with a small group of friends. You can't really talk about this movie. You can't really talk about the deep, dark, heart of it without giving away the story or the end. I was looking through the rotten tomatoes reviews and they all have the same problem. You know the reviewer is moved, but you don't know why. Part of it is storytelling, but every movie is that, more or less. The 'more' of this movie is that it asks a great and important question through the lives of the three main characters. Clint Eastwood is a boxing trainer, Morgan Freeman a former boxer who is Eastwood's friend and who also works in Eastwood's gym, and Hillary Swank an aspiring boxer. All three are remarkable but Hillary Swank is the best of the three: she is not acting, she is not channelling, she is. She, completely and utterly, is. Her performance is generous, not to the other characters, but to the character she herself is playing. Every word, movement, or gesture is a form of respect for Maggie, the boxer. I can't talk about the great central question of the film - that I will think about as I lie in bed tonight trying to sleep. Because I know I will see her face when I close my eyes. The images haunt you that way.
I can talk about this: that Maggie, in the early part of the film, is all struggle. Some of the reviews talk about her fighting in the context of feminism, or post-feminism. Reading that made me impatient because the questions her struggle raises are more primal, and more central. What is at our very core? What is the very essence, the very minimum, that characterizes our struggle? I'm sorry, I have to make the same excuse A.O. Scott made in his review in the NYT. All these lofty words, and all because I can't tell you what happens. And, I don't really think I want to. For once, I don't want to write it. I want to think it, and think it quietly and privately.
Watch this movie.
(And yes, yes, I know I should link to the reviews I am talking about but I am exhausted. I'll do it later.)
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