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Gran Torino

Gran Old Man

Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino

I doubt that even Clint Eastwood’s most ardent fans (and you can count me as one) had particularly high hopes for Gran Torino. All of the hype was geared up for Changeling, the big-budget prestige picture. If you even knew that there was going to be a second Eastwood movie this year, in theaters barely two months after the Angelina Jolie film, you probably assumed that it was a knockoff Eastwood did during a lull. The fact that he would be starring in the film, despite claims of retiring from work in front of the camera after Million Dollar Baby, was a pleasant surprise but not an overwhelming one. Eastwood is, after all, a product of the Hollywood studios’ assembly-line days, a craftsman who simply enjoys making movies and who has been known to take on second-rate scripts (remember Blood Work?) just to keep busy.

For all I know the genesis of Gran Torino may have been no more than that. It was filmed on location in Detroit, far from Eastwood’s usual Los Angeles, and probably for a fraction of Changeling’s budget. The script, by newcomer Nick Schenk, wasn’t written with Eastwood in mind. And yet the result is not only one of the best of his career but one that seems inevitable, to anyone who has been paying attention to his work of the past two decades, that he would make.

Eastwood stars as Walt Kowalski, a name that might conjure up an old Buffalonian who refuses to move out of the East Side neighborhood where he grew up and raised a family. Walt actually lives in Detroit, where he worked on an auto assembly line for years after coming back from the Korean War.

The movie opens at the funeral of his wife. Funerals can serve as an opportunity for families to patch up their wounds in shared grieving, but that’s not the case here. The only thing for which Walt has more contempt than his children is his grandchildren, who are too busy with handheld electronics to pay much attention to the burial of their grandmother. Walt’s kids want to move him out of his house, in a neighborhood where he is about the only remaining white face, but he is having none of it.

In reasonably good health despite a diet of frozen dinners and Pabst Blue Ribbon, Walt spends his days on his porch talking to his dog and growling at kids who get too close to his lawn. These kids are largely from the house next door, a family about whom Walt knows no more other than the visible evidence that they are Asian. Not that he refers to them as Asians: “gooks,” “zipperheads,” “eggrolls”—he has so many disparaging terms that he seemed never to use the same one twice.

They are in fact Hmong, a people from the area bordering Viet Nam, Thailand, and Laos, who helped the US during the war in Viet Nam and for that reason largely dispersed thereafter. Much of the film, which you will be surprised to learn if you have seen the misleading television ads for Gran Torino, involves Walt’s journey to discovery of his neighbors, with whom he has more in common than his own family. The bridge is two of the children in this extended family: Thao (Bee Vang), a withdrawn, fatherless, teenage boy whom a gang encourages to try to steal Walt’s car, a mint 1972 Gran Torino; and his sister Sue (Ahney Her), who becomes his caretaker when the family elevates him to the status of a hero for chasing away the gang, even though he was only protecting his lawn.

Though familiar, these parts of the movie are very likeable and often very funny. Brought out of his shell, Walt determines to guide Thao into manhood, which to his mind means familiarizing him with a good tool kit and teaching him the proper amount of profanity to employ in conversations with other men.

But gangs don’t go away easily, and the film takes a darker turn. As his late wife knew, Walt carries a lot of scars from his stint in Korea. It was her hope that he would unburden himself to the baby-faced priest (Christopher Carley) who was a comfort in her dying days. Instead, Walt finds redemption in a wholly different act of Christianity.

Despite Eastwood’s age, he still has legion fans who want him to do another Dirty Harry film. Eastwood was an icon of screen violence in an earlier day, a role he took with more ambiguity than many ticket buyers. That guy served as a bridge out of a time when violence was accepted as a part of our national character. But over the years Eastwood’s films have delved more deeply into the American understanding of violence and vengeance. Gran Torino is, I think, a mea culpa for anything he may have done in the past (intentionally or not) to glorify violence, whether as fantasy or as a way of life. That may sound like a rejection to the Dirty Harry buffs. But I hope they go to see this fine film anyway. I don’t think they will regret it.



Watch the movie trailer for Gran Torino


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