Million Dollar Baby has received a great deal critical praise in the last month, including an Oscar nomination for best picture. I suspect that a lot of that praise, however, has less to do with its overall greatness, and more to do with the film’s lack of errors. In technical terms, Million Dollar Baby does everything right.

Though lacking the rich, textured quality of the very best films, the script is sound. More importantly, it’s a sports story that avoids many of the clichés of the traditional sports film. This is impressive because, right from the start, it feels like something we’ve seen many times before.

We meet Maggie (Hilary Swank), a hard-luck case who has come from a poor family but is a hard worker and willing to do whatever it takes to be a great boxer. Her reluctant trainer is Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood), who is struggling to restore his broken relationship with his daughter. Frankie helps Maggie move to the top, but the film stays grounded by focusing on the very real and very painful wounds that both characters bear in association with their family.

Throughout the film, Scrap (Morgan Freeman), a washed-up old boxer, observes and narrates the events, making comments about Magie’s boxing experiences that are also metaphorically true for Frankie’s poor relationship with his daughter. At one point, for example, Eddie says “some wounds are too deep…and no matter how hard you work at it, you just can’t stop the bleeding.”

Million Dollar Baby is also flawless in its direction and acting. Much like last year’s Mystic River, Eastwood maintains a dark, shadowy atmosphere that sets the tone for the somber emotions that preside over the film’s final act.

Though the film keeps itself free of major errors, it also fails to reach heights of greatness. The parallel story of Frankie and his daughter, for example, is engaging throughout the film, but fails to pay off with an underdeveloped conclusion. While the film is too subtle in this respect, it goes too far in its veneration for success at something as ultimately trivial as boxing. We begin to get detached when it tries to tell us that a boxing fight well fought is like a life well lived. Though the story doesn’t really add up to telling us how to a good live is lived, it does succeed in showing us how a good film is made.

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