Million Dollar Baby cleaned up at the Academy Awards last night in the wake of a cultural debate over it’s euthanasia advocating plot. However, as Thomas Hibbs writes in an outstanding piece for NRO, the real focus of Eastwood’s movie is not how and when to die what is life like without God.
Beneath its surface, Million Dollar Baby, like Eastwood’s previous film, Mystic River, entertains the question, "What if God does not exist?" In both films, the human condition is a barren landscape, a place
dominated by amoral forces and marked by brutal indifference to human
longing and suffering. Indeed, human life is, as Hobbes once bluntly
described it, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Although it
has a more traditional plot, Million Dollar Baby is as nihilistic as any of the films of Quentin Tarantino or David Lynch.
Make sure to read the rest of the article and I highly recommend Hibbs’ book Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from The Exorcist to Seinfeld as well.