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 Dubious Conclusions Movie critics hate giving away endings. Disability-rights advocates think they should have made an exception for Million Dollar Baby. When reviewers hailed Million Dollar Baby as a virtually perfect little movie, their code of silence guarded the picture's crucial secret. If you're not ready to learn the secret, turn the page. But thanks to that secret, the film's getting a second wave of press. A headline in last Sunday's London Telegraph read, "Disabled groups condemn Eastwood euthanasia film," and a story in USA Today urged readers to see the movie "immediately" because the secret's about to get out, "a hot-button social issue itching to be debated." The debate's already under way. Kalman Kaplan, a professor of psychology at Wayne State University, wrote a letter of protest to Roger Ebert. He seconded Ebert's praise for the first two-thirds of Million Dollar Baby, the portion Ebert had described in his review. "My disagreement is with what you haven't discussed: the 90 degree turn after Maggie's tragic accident into a naive . . . factually incorrect, out-of-date and dangerous characterization of a disabled person, and its implicit advocacy . . . of mercy-killing of the disabled." He compared Million Dollar Baby to propaganda films made in Germany under Hitler. 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. 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. Diane Coleman considers herself lucky to have known what was coming. Coleman, president of Not Dead Yet, has spinal muscular atrophy. She's been in a wheelchair since she was 11 and is now on a ventilator at night. "I was the only wheelchair user in the theater, which was packed," she says. "I already knew what I was going to see, and I was pretty much steeled against it in terms of personal pain. But I couldn't stop thinking about all the people I see at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago who are newly injured and how they would react when they were assaulted by the ending. "The whole thing is so contrived, because people already have the right to refuse treatment. She was on a ventilator, and she had the legal right to refuse it. The role of everyone else is to convince them that life is worth living." The Daily Herald's Dann Gire, president of the Chicago Film Critics Association, noticed people arriving at the Altman celebration carrying a flyer they'd just been handed. Few of them seemed to know what the issue was, so Gire went out and talked to the Not Dead Yet picketers. "It was the most genteel protest I'd ever seen," Gire says. "They were very pleasant people." Later in the evening, when Gire announced that Eastwood had won the Chicago critics' award for best director, he mentioned them. He called the protesters sincere and well-intentioned but also seriously mistaken. "I said, 'This is not a movie for the heartless. It's a movie for people with big hearts.'" 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." Disability rights activists have always counted Ebert among their allies. He said that if I wondered about his personal views on euthanasia I should reread last month's review of the Spanish film The Sea Inside, about a quadriplegic who decides to die. "This is simply the story of one man," he'd written. "Yes, and on those terms I accept it, and was moved by the humanity and logic of the character. But it happens I know a few things about paraplegia." Ebert's but turned into a digression on profoundly disabled people he's known who've triumphed in life. "What would I do in the same situation as the man in Spain?" he wrote, getting back to the movie. "I am reminded of something written by another Spaniard, the director Luis Buñuel. What made him angriest about dying, he said, was that he would be unable to read tomorrow's newspaper. I believe I would want to live as long as I could." In 1997 Eastwood was sued by a woman in a wheelchair with multiple sclerosis. Diane zum Brunnen alleged that a hotel he owned in Carmel, California, didn't meet state and federal access standards for the disabled. A jury found Eastwood guilty of minor violations but refused to award zum Brunnen damages, and afterward Eastwood crusaded for a change in the Americans With Disabilities Act. He argued before Congress that business owners accused of violations deserved 90 days to bring their businesses into compliance before they could be sued. Disability rights groups maintained that this leeway would gut the act. Now Not Dead Yet and allied groups read a very specific message into Million Dollar Baby. "Clint Eastwood is remembered by many for his national attack on the Americans With Disabilities Act," said Marcie Roth, head of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association in a statement released by the group. "I'm saddened but not surprised that he uses the powerful vehicle of film to perpetuate his view that the lives of persons with significant disabilities are not worth living." The Not Dead Yet flyer declared, "People who actually know something about Eastwood and about disability see this movie for what it is. It's Eastwood's revenge and we will not sit by silently while ignorant reviewers further Eastwood's career on our collective backs." |
