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The film perpetrates sobriety and seriousness that excruciate the viewer with an uncomfortable mood and poignancy. The story is plain and painful under the delayed revelation of the real agenda of assisted-suicide (in the last 45 minutes). Director Clint Eastwood adopts an unrestricted narrative structure for story progression. Unlike "The Mystic River" (Dir: Clint Eastwood, 2003), there is no hermeneutic code throughout.

There is strong story causality in the narrative. The substances and circumstantial factors (e.g., relations among family members) that make up the story are realistic in the real world. The use of voice-over of Eddie Dupris (Morgan Freeman) serves to calibrate the position of the narrator between an outsider (a sheer onlooker) and an insider (who introspects and reviews what the 3 main characters do). This device maintains a balance between involvement and alienation. A single plot is adopted throughout (without subplot). Eastwood uses only one spatial and temporal dimension. No flashback or meditation is invoked. Except for a few transition of shots with slow elliptical editing, there are almost no other special transition device. These reduce the readability of the product but position a sharp focus on the diegesis, conversation and staging (particularly facial expressions reflecting intrinsic psychology) of the characters. To compartmentalize the visuals into the mournful mood of the story, Eastwood resorts to the use of subdued background lighting, an intensive use of cast shadows of subjects and objects and attached shadows of the characters' faces. Most sequences do not come with music. Where music is adopted, it is subdued and sober.

The theme starts with a bright philosophy of endeavours and industriousness under the deluge of plot time on the portrayal of the evolving psychology of boxing trainer, Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood), from apathy to empathy toward his then trainee, Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), out of his subconscious motive to redress his father-daughter estrangement (only covertly conveyed and his daughter is off-screen).

Nevertheless, the theme bears a 180-degree change from courage to self-indulgence, from positive to negative, from valour and mania to an unnerving and decadent psychology upon Maggie's calamitous trauma. The contrasted depiction on what Maggie does for her mum when the former can afford a better living and what her mum does for her after the calamity is particularly poignant. The plot line on the conversation between Frankie and Father Horvak (Brian F O'Byrne) in the later sequence entails a brief coverage of the point of view of the Catholics regarding the issue of assisted-suicide. Under the delayed revelation of the genuine issue, the second tier of the theme of abandonment overrides the initial brightness, defraying the positiveness and becoming dominant over the entire film. While "Ray" (Dir: Taylor Hackford, 2005) is enlightening and "The Aviator" (Dir: Martin Scorsese, 2005) is sympathetic towards the goliath, "MDB", though with good staging from Eastwood, Freeman and Swank, is loaded with a negative theme and the choices of the protagonists concluded pre-maturely and unconvincingly.

註：本評論純屬影評作者個人意見，並不代表本網立場。
Note: This views presented in this review is solely the views of the critic who wrote it and do not represent the stance of our website.

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