Maggie Fitzgerald is an ambitious model for every girl. Maggie decided to learn boxing. She asked one of the aspiring boxers, Frankie Dunn, to train her. Frankie categorically refused because he did not want to train girls. Frankie's life seems completely isolated from others. He is a lonely man isolated from his only daughter and has no friends. In the end, Frankie agrees to train Maggie. Maggie started her favorite game and was able to prove to Frankie that she was the boxer Frankie always dreamed of. She was the only friend who filled the great void he had in his life.
The film is impeccably made, but more than that, the director who also composed the lovely music score, brings a rare degree of humanity to the intensely moving conclusion.
Always one of America's most undervalued directors, Clint Eastwood is proving himself the American cinema's national treasure in the third act of his career.
Barely a year after the release of Mystic River, Clint Eastwood delivers a second consecutive drama that fearlessly probes the shadows of human morality without falling back on easy answers.
It is thoughtful, unfashionable, measured, mostly honest, sometimes clumsy or remote, often exciting, occasionally moving and eventually surprising. It's correct.
From beginning to end, its dark, foreboding atmosphere reflects the troubled world in which its three central figures conduct their essentially moral lives.
The movie is simultaneously conventional and subversive, broad and nuanced, shamelessly manipulative and genuinely moving, a cheap sucker punch and a work of real moral weight.