Eastwood's Ring is only 20 years old and already a classic

Sports films are rarely about sport: they are pulsations of unease, of marginality, a challenge to death through the metaphor of the body. And they are often the highest test for a director who is not used to playing with that genre, the litmus test of his skill. Thus Martin Scorse's Raging Bull, Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher - An American Story, Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler and the recent Tatami by Zahra Amir Ebrahimi and Guy Nattiv. But, in my opinion, the most glorious, intense and original of these is Million Dollar Baby, which turns 20 years old this year, unscathed by the wearing wing of time. It is, and remains, the highest peak of Clint Eastwood's directorial talent.

The story is that of a girl from the slums, Margaret "Maggie" Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), no longer very young, who manages with tenacity, and after repeated refusals, to be trained as a boxer by the old and grumpy manager Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood himself). A heart-rending filial relationship is born between the two, which unfolds in a personal noir shot in a state of grace, the summa of Eastwoodian poetics paved in more than forty films, unencumbered by the profit imperative and indifferent to fashions. Eastwood was not even supposed to act this time and instead something attracted him to take on Swank, who had a similar story to Maggie behind her, that of a destitute girl who fought to do what she wanted to do, actress. Eastwood himself struggled to establish himself as a director, initially hampered by the myth that nailed him as an actor in the Dollar Trilogy and the Inspector Callaghan saga. Both were tireless workers, no-nonsense professionals: Swank trained daily for the part for four months.

The film, based on a short story from the collection Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner by F.X. Toole, has become - even with a triangulation with old boxer Eddie 'Scrap-Iron' (Morgan Freeman) - the most musical of Eastwood's films. The three actors seem to be jamming under Tom Stern's dark, jazz club lights. For Million dollar Baby, the director even went so far as to write the soundtrack, as he did for some of his most successful stories, from Mystic river to Gran Torino. And his instincts paid off: the film shot in 37 days, with most of the scenes good on the first take, won four hefty Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress to Hilary Swank, Best Supporting Actor to Morgan Freeman. And then box-office satisfaction: starting from a budget of $30 million, it grossed almost $217 million. But above all, Million dolla baby fully satisfies all the themes dear to Eastwood: the questioning of masculinity (The Man in the Crosshairs, Bronko Billy,Tight Rope, The Merciless, Gran Torino); the traumas of childhood and the loss of innocence (A Perfect World,Mystic River, Hereafter); the strength of the female character coming to terms with a patriarchal world (The Bridges of Madison County, Changeling); the concept of heroism and the pervasive role of violence (Flags of our fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima).

Million Dollar Baby was filmed in the legendary Gleason's Gym in New York where 134 world champions trained, from Muhammad Ali to Mike Tyson to the Jake La Motta of Raging Bull. Gleason's has also been the set of more than twenty films, which in a recent book photographer Maria Cristina Vimercati has beautifully depicted (Boxe. Gleason's Gym New York, Dario Cimorelli Editore, pp. 128, € 36). Opened in the Bronx in 1937 by an Italian and then moved to Brooklyn, Gleason's was frequented mostly by the Irish community. That very connotation must have inspired Eastwood to make his character a tormented Irish Catholic in search of faith.

Million Dollar Baby is 20 years old and already a classic. Maggie through her body overcomes the fatal attraction of being the scapegoat of a family that rejects her. As she fights 'monsters' much stronger than her, she actually struggles to be accepted by members of her family, using fame and financial success as currency to buy the love her mother and sister cannot feel for her, too different, too talented and sidereally distant to be understood. Perhaps the most moving moment in the film is not so much the supreme sacrifice of a believer against his principles to alleviate the suffering of a loved one, but the titanic effort to defend Maggie from her relatives, breaking the pattern of her tendency to reiterate the role of victim. This, moreover, is what sport does: it allows us the luxury of giving a few heroes, the athletes, the chance to overcome our limits, to challenge the unknown. On second thought, in this yes, Million Dollar Baby is a sports film.