Penn's ambivalent response to the discovery that he has killed an innocent man is not the only way in which "Mystic River" deviates from a simple, anti-vigilantism message. The greater, though largely unexamined, issue is that Robbins is not completely "innocent." While he may not have killed Penn's daughter that night, he did commit murder: The blood on his shirt came from a pedophile whom he encountered in the street and beat to death. That murder is almost an afterthought in the film, however, a necessary plot device that is given remarkably little moral weight. It's as if Eastwood is telling us that the killing of a pedophile doesn't count. (And that's if Robbins' victim even is a pedophile: We get only a glimpse of the boy who is with him, but he is clearly well into his teens and could easily be of age.) "Mystic River" may be a melancholy meditation on the self-perpetuating cycle of violence. But, like "Unforgiven" before it, it's far from an unequivocal condemnation of vigilante justice.

"Million Dollar Baby" seems to renounce retribution altogether, though it does so quietly. The film differs in subject matter from most of Eastwood's work -- there are no cops or criminals or cowboys -- but in the end, it too is a film about the human cost of violence. (If you are still unaware of the film's central plot twist, and you want to remain that way, stop reading now.)

Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) is a 33-year-old waitress who's dreamed of becoming a boxer. She persuades a grizzled old trainer named Frankie Dunn (Eastwood) to take her on, and he turns her into a top fighter. When Swank gets her shot at a title fight, however, the triumphal sports movie takes an unexpected swerve: Hit by a dirty shot after the bell, Swank is permanently paralyzed from the neck down. Without hope of recovery, she attempts suicide before finally persuading Eastwood to help her die.

To some degree, "Million Dollar Baby" is still locked in Eastwood's Manichaean world of good guys and bad guys: The boxer who cripples Swank is cartoonishly villainous, a former East German prostitute who is famously "the dirtiest boxer in the ring" and who deliberately hits Swank from behind long after the round has ended. But while Eastwood's invocation of big-E "evil" is all too familiar, what's new is that he shows no interest whatsoever in punishing that evil. No one jumps into the ring to attack the dirty fighter, or even takes the case up with the boxing commission. Having fulfilled her role, the villain vanishes from the movie. Back in the "Dirty Harry" days, Eastwood explained that his movies were about the rights of victims rather than the rights of criminals. But he rarely wasted much screen time on those victims; their stories of loss were little more than the rationale for his stories of vengeance. In his more recent films, such as "True Crime," "Blood Work" and "Mystic River," Eastwood has devoted more time to the suffering of the victims. With "Million Dollar Baby," he focuses exclusively on it, essentially letting the perp walk. His character is a would-be healer, not a would-be avenger.

But Swank cannot be healed, and Eastwood eventually grants her plea to end her life. This has been read as a pro-euthanasia message in some quarters, but here again, the reality is somewhat more complicated. Eastwood's boxing trainer, Frankie Dunn, is in many ways another iteration of Will Munny from "Unforgiven" (and, for that matter, of Sean Penn's character in "Mystic River"). Like Munny, Dunn is filled with remorse for some past crime, though we never learn what it is, only that it has to do with a daughter who sends his letters back unopened. Like Munny, at the end of the film he contemplates an act that he knows will result in his being lost forever, with no hope of salvation. And like Munny, he moves away after committing the act, leaving behind his friends and disappearing into the realm of rumor (in this case, the rumor of a swampland diner rather than of the City by the Bay). The parallel is not exact, but it is striking. Yet the two films have been read in diametrically opposite ways: "Unforgiven" as a condemnation of Munny's vengeance killing and "Million Dollar Baby" as an endorsement of Dunn's mercy killing.

Both films, in other words, have been generally interpreted as having a "liberal" message, much as Eastwood's films in the 1970s and 1980s were widely read as "conservative" even when they condemned war ("The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"), denounced vigilantism ("Magnum Force"), disdained law and order ("Every Which Way but Loose"), or concluded on a note of forgiveness ("The Outlaw Josey Wales"). Do Eastwood's recent films constitute an apology for his earlier ones? Perhaps. But he may not be the only one with apologies to make.

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