This month is Poetry Month. I have a blog about poetry that a wrote a few days ago and still need to post, but in the meantime, today's Monday Movie is... Million Dollar Baby.
If you've only heard of this movie, or if it's been a while since you watched it, you might be wondering what it has to do with Poetry Month. However, this movie is actually all about Yeats' poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfrey."
Superficially, Million Dollar Baby is about a female boxer, played by Hillary Swank, and her reluctant trainer, played by Clint Eastwood (who also directs the film). Morgan Freeman serves as the film's narrator, and the boxing gym's janitor.
Oddly, perhaps, Eastwood's character also studies Gaelic throughout the film and happens to enjoy Yeats. Once Swank's character begins competing as a boxer, he even givers her a Gaelic nickname, which endears her to fans across the world.
The Gaelic/Yeats connection, however, is more profound. Though only a few lines of "The Lake Isle of Innisfrey" are read in the movie, the themes between it and the film are highly analogous. In fact, I would almost call Million Dollar Baby an adaptation of the poem because it is essentially about the same thing. Eastwood's character (the protagonist) is even overtly driven by the poem.
In any case, it's a touching, if tragic, film that also is one of recent cinema's more successful uses of poetry. (You can read about a few more if you want in this poetry movie countdown that I wrote for Rhombus).
Monday, April 19, 2010
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I'm not sure I approve of the Live song used during that trailer, but the movie was great, and I approve of the recommendation.
ReplyDeletehahaha. you know what, I watched this trailer a few months ago for some reason, so when I embedded it here I just checked to make sure the images were the same (and then assumed the whole thing was the same), and didn't actually listen to it (I was at work at the time). I totally forgot about the audio. I know that's terrible, but it's true.
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