Million Dollar Baby

How this film uses it

Eastwood's training montages are there to build character. They show the specific, gruff tenderness of Frankie's methods and Maggie's ferocious will. You watch a relationship form through physical discipline.

Where to see it

The early training sequences in the Hit Pit gym. Frankie's reluctant corrections turn into a kind of devotion he refuses to name.

How this film uses it

For most of its runtime, the film works as a boxing success story. Then it turns catastrophically at the championship fight and becomes an intimate story about grief. The turn changes how you see everything before it.

Where to see it

The illegal punch after the bell at the championship fight and Maggie's fall onto her corner stool. The film breaks its promise to be a boxing story here, and something rawer and harder takes over.

How this film uses it

Eddie Dupris narrates the film looking back, in the form of a letter to Frankie's estranged daughter. Every scene ends up feeling like testimony, a man explaining to an absent person what her father was.

Where to see it

The final voiceover. It explains what Frankie did for Maggie before he disappeared. Because it is a letter, his absence is left as the film's last mystery.

How this film uses it

Tom Stern's photography keeps the gym underlit at all times, amber against darkness. It feels like a place outside normal social time, a private world with its own ethics.

Where to see it

Maggie working the speed bag at night in the gym after Scrap closes up.