Continuing this trend of posing moral questions with no easy answers, Eastwood followed Mystic River up the following year with his second Oscar-winning feature, Million Dollar Baby. There are apparently a number of detractors of this movie now, but I would maintain that it deserves the accolades it received then just as much today. Eastwood reteamed with old partner Morgan Freeman in this one, an even more visually and tonally pared down story of a boxing trainer and his female underdog boxing amateur.
This one may be most indicative of Eastwood’s style, love it or hate it. It’s epitomized by the style of music Eastwood makes, scoring this movie as well as others he has directed and others still that he did not direct. It’s very simple, quiet piano or guitar underscoring moments that are fittingly quiet and delicate. It follows the fighter genre to the extent that its characters wrestle with issues outside the ring as well as in, and the film treats this with the sort of gentle hand appropriate for a relationship between figures who become like father and daughter to one another. It’s beautiful, simple, and heartfelt, with a general quality maximizing the effects of its feelings and ideas. It seemed safe to assume this was as fine a film as Clint Eastwood could muster.
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