Dubious Conclusions
Kaplan had seen Million Dollar Baby and written Ebert at the urging of a Chicago-based group of disability rights activists, Not Dead Yet. That was Not Dead Yet picketing outside the Union League Club on January 19 when the Chicago Film Critics Association gathered to honor Robert Altman. Not Dead Yet was angry that Ebert and company hadn’t protested the film’s shocking ending. Paralyzed in the ring, Maggie, the boxer played by Hilary Swank, would rather die than live as a quadriplegic, even with a devoted Frankie Dunn at her beck and call. (Perhaps because Eastwood, who plays Frankie, is 44 years older than Swank, Maggie realized it wouldn’t last.) Though a priest warns him he’ll never forgive himself, Frankie pulls out her ventilator, gives her a lethal shot of adrenaline, then wanders into the night. This plot twist was the film’s foray into moral complexity. How well did it keep its footing? The question was off-limits.
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As Ebert said in his Sun-Times review, “I will not spoil the experience of following this story into the deepest secrets of life and death.” Michael Wilmington’s Tribune review described the film only as a “Cinderella story [that] suddenly switches gears, and turns dark and heartbreaking in its final act.” The result of their circumspection is that I sat nervously through Million Dollar Baby’s unlikely but heartwarming first two acts waiting for those gears to switch. It was a lousy way to see a movie, almost as disconcerting as knowing the outcome in advance.
Coleman had tried to reach Ebert by phone and e-mail, but in an e-mail from the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, Ebert told me he hadn’t gotten her messages, hadn’t seen Kaplan’s letter, and hadn’t even been aware of the picketing. He’d thought opposition to the movie was coming from the Christian right (hardly a label that applies to Not Dead Yet). Someone in California had written Ebert to complain that Michael Medved had slammed Million Dollar Baby on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club and given away the movie’s “vital secrets and surprises.” In last Sunday’s “Answer Man” column in the Sun-Times, Ebert responded that “Medved knows better, so what he did was deliberate and unforgivable.”
Kalman Kaplan, who used to run the suicide-prevention clinic at Michael Reese Hospital, sees a double standard at work in how society weighs the interests of the disabled. “My bias was to keep people from killing themselves,” he says. “It’s not a question of civil liberties. It’s a question of why they want to do what they want to do and what can you help them do to find reasons to live. There’s a dual system. If somebody is physically disabled and has the same psychological problems as somebody who’s not physically disabled, the stance of the therapist might be very different.”
From E! Online: “Is Clint Eastwood feeling lucky? The movie star, director and former mayor hopes a jury will make his day.”
