Why the ‘Million Dollar’ secret?

Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby” is an engrossing work of cinematic art with profoundly serious intentions.

According to the vast majority of the nation’s film critics, nearly all those intentions have been fully and brilliantly realized, which is why the movie is a contender in multiple Academy Award categories, including best picture. But “Million Dollar Baby” also is a film whose moral center -- and, yes, this is a movie for which you can use those words without blushing -- is a quietly confrontational exploration of one of this era’s most delicate, complex and contentious issues. That is the religiously, philosophically, socially and legally fraught question of assisted suicide.

That’s a pretty hot and thought-provoking topic. And anything that involves drama, film stars, morality and controversy usually careens deafeningly around the media echo chamber like the mythic call of the Horn Resounding.

So, why the silence here?

Well, if you haven’t seen the film, the odds are you don’t know that it even involves euthanasia. The reason you don’t know is because the nation’s film critics made a collective decision not to tell you -- or, to be more precise, they decided you don’t really want to know. In fact, for all the critical attention justifiably lavished on “Million Dollar Baby,” not a single review in a single major U.S. newspaper or magazine even alluded to the presence -- let alone the dramatic centrality -- of an assisted suicide. That includes the notices that appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and every other publication of any size or reputation accessible on the Web.

How that occurred and why raises a number of interesting questions about the state of film criticism as it currently is practiced in American newspapers and news magazines.

Boxing insider

“Million Dollar Baby” is based on a short story of the same name by the late Jerry Boyd, the Long Beach-born son of an Irish immigrant and a veteran cut man and trainer, who wrote under the pen name F.X. Toole. It was part of a brilliant and highly praised collection of boxing fiction, “Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner,” published to critical acclaim not long before Boyd’s untimely death two years ago at the age of 72. In the film, Eastwood plays Frankie Dunn, a cut man and trainer, who owns a suitably seedy gym called the Hit Pit. Its janitor and Dunn’s best friend is a one-eyed former fighter, Eddie “Scrap Iron” Dupris, played by Morgan Freeman. (It is, by the way, a pairing that wonderfully echoes the long, real-life partnership between Boyd and trainer Dub Huntley, to whom Toole dedicated “Rope Burns.”)

Eastwood’s Dunn is a loner who reads Yeats, studies Gaelic and writes weekly letters to an estranged daughter, who just as regularly returns them unopened. He’s a Catholic who attends daily Mass, after which he torments a weary young priest with the theological equivalent of wiseguy questions. The centrality of the suicide issue to this story is obvious, since this protagonist is clearly situated as a practicing member of a church whose greatest 20th century theologian, the German Jesuit Karl Rahner, defined mortal sin as “the will to die autonomously.”

Into this mix comes the aspiring young female boxer Maggie, played by Hilary Swank, who wins success trained by the initially reluctant Frankie. Bonds are formed. Unforeseeable tragedy occurs. One of the main characters is left a quadriplegic and, unable to bear with that state, asks another of the characters to help in committing suicide. How that protagonist responds is the moral and emotional heart of the film.

So why is it absent from the reviews? The answer, according to a number of leading film critics, is that -- just as physicians are schooled to do no harm -- the cardinal rule of newspaper and magazine film criticism is “never give away the plot.” Moreover, the critics interviewed for this column unanimously made the point that the volume and anger of reader response to their work soars beyond comfort whenever they’re deemed to have “given up too much.” Some even recount incidents in which their editors raised questions about just how much detail they’d included in their reviews -- however relevant to the critical points at issue. Readers, they insist, don’t want to know this much. It spoils the movie!

Film as an art form

It’s an interesting argument -- and obviously sincerely offered -- but it’s spoken in the language of commerce and not art, which is why it rings hollow when applied to a film like “Million Dollar Baby.” It’s obvious that a reviewer’s stance will vary according to the work under consideration. It would be churlish to give away the plot of a thriller -- such as “The Sixth Sense” -- or even what Graham Greene would have termed “an entertainment,” like “The Crying Game” or his own “The Third Man.”

But a serious film with genuinely important themes occupies an entirely different aesthetic space and demands the same sort of treatment that a great novel or important painting demands. To presume otherwise is to relegate film to a lesser art and film criticism to a lesser genre.

Imagine the Getty had acquired an important new painting and your newspaper’s art critic were sent to review it and came back to report, “This is a masterpiece that has as its theme a vital moral issue, which is depicted in a shocking image. However, I’m not going to tell about either the issue or the image, because I don’t want to spoil your experience of the painting.”

The person who wrote that quickly would be encouraged to seek opportunities in the burgeoning food service sector.

In one review of “Million Dollar Baby” after another, however, critics Delphicly referred to the film taking “a dark turn.” A dark turn? It has a positively 19th century ring, but what the devil does it mean? It’s a come-on, not a critical observation, which bring us back to the nexus of commerce and film criticism. The problem with revealing too much then is that people won’t go out to see the movie so criticism becomes about getting people into theater seats and not about getting ideas about this or any other film into their heads.

It’s hard to imagine why, in this year of controversy over the failure of “The Passion of the Christ” and “Fahrenheit 9/11” to win best picture nominations, at least one critic didn’t somehow feel obliged to make the point that they were passed over because they were propaganda and “Million Dollar Baby” was included because it is art. Surely, somebody who cares about film, as a critic is presumed to do, wanted to make the point that there is an essential difference between art that provokes and a work that is merely provocative.

Somewhere in all this, there’s a misperception of responsibility and a fundamental mistrust of the readers masquerading as sensitivity. Maybe it’s time for American film criticism to take off the training wheels.