Million Dollar Baby, directed by Clint Eastwood, is an exposé of the world of boxing, with many explanatory voiceovers throughout the film by Morgan Freeman. Although the plot appears to be about the career of the title role, Maggie Fitzgerald (played by Hilary Swank), the center of the story is really Frankie Dunn (played by Clint Eastwood). Frankie trains and manages up-and-coming boxers and operates a dingy boxing gymnasium in Los Angeles for those who seek to train but have little money for gym membership. Twenty-three years earlier, he allowed eager boxer Eddie “Scrap-Iron” Dupris (played by Morgan Freeman) to engage in a title fight. When Scrap lost an eye, Freddie blamed himself for allowing him to enter the ring against a titleholder before he was ready. For penance, Freddie hired Scrap as the gym janitor, began to attend Catholic mass daily despite his nonacceptance of church dogma, and undertook to read the consoling words of William Yeats in the original Gaelic. When the film begins, his best boxer wins a significant victory and requests a title fight. Freddie turns him down, claiming that he is not yet ready; soon, he gets a new fight manager and shocks Freddie by saying goodbye. Then one day, thirty-one-year-old Maggie, a waitress who left the Ozarks, enters the gym, begins to slug a punching bag, and begs to have Freddie train her to become a boxer, a career that she claims will give real meaning to her life. At first, Freddie responds that he does not train girls, but her determination is so impressive that Scrap secretly gives her a tip one evening. On the next day or so, when Freddie sees that she has improved, he decides to train her after all. In due course, Maggie enters the ring and knocks out her first female opponent in the first round. After that, she continues to deliver knockout punches in the first round, even though Freddie explains that fight managers do not like to have their boxers eliminated in the first round. Accordingly, Freddie has to pay under the table to get new opponents. Maggie’s fame elicits an invitation to fight England’s top female boxer in her weight class. Although Maggie, as an American, is ineligible to win a British title, she is eager to accept, but Freddie at first demurs. Then Freddie decides to take his champ abroad, and she fights matches triumphantly all over Europe. Returning to the United States, Maggie is eager for a title fight, and soon she is in the ring with the top female boxer in her weight division. Whereas Maggie is idealistic and has spent some of her earnings to buy a house for her family in Missouri, her opponent is out for blood. At the end of a round, she slugs Maggie’s head when her back is turned as she is returning to her corner. As a result, Maggie becomes quadriplegic and attached to a respirator. Freddie then obviously feels guilty. When Maggie says that her life no longer has any meaning, Freddie contemplates whether to remove the respirator so that she can die in peace, an act that clearly is murder. The drama, nevertheless, fails to inform filmviewers about important legal realities. At one point, Maggie’s “white trash” family enters the hospital, accompanied by a lawyer, in an effort to get her to sign a financial power of attorney, yet if Maggie dies without a will, her estate will revert to her mother anyway. Although Freddie considers pulling the plug on Maggie, in fact the respirator is attached because a hospital physician had no other choice, since she never signed a health power of attorney to permit Freddie to make decisions while she was unconscious. The film might have suggested that filmviewers should be protected legally by having wills and powers of attorney, but no such advice is dispensed. Although Million Dollar Baby, based on the novel Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner (2000) by the pseudonymous F. X. Toole (actually by seventy-year-old former fight manager Jerry Boyd), may be viewed as advocating the decriminalization of assisted suicide, in fact the message appears to be that anyone can legally engage in assisted suicide today. Contrary to the film, Freddie would easily have been apprehended as the most logical homicide suspect, and Eastwood could have had his day in court to plead the case for assisted suicide. While Dr. Jack Kevorkian languishes in a Michigan prison, will Clint Eastwood bankroll the defense of the next person to do so in real life? Dispensing bad legal advice would disbar Eastwood if he had a law degree, but instead he won an Academy Award for Best Director of 2004, and the film also won Best Picture. Perhaps Eastwood is content that he in effect filed a cinematic friend-of-the-court brief regarding the legality of assisted suicide, a matter before the Supreme Court of the United States when the film debuted. MH