Directed by Clint Eastwood
R, 116 minutes
-Jonathan Richards
POLITICALLY INCORRECT
If Mt. Rushmore were to make a movie, it would probably look a lot like a Clint Eastwood movie. There is something so iconic, so chiseled in granite about Eastwood's screen persona, that it stands apart from the specifics of the film's material and trails with it ghosts and whispers of values and challenges of an America that may never have existed but is appealing to think about.
There is nothing particularly nice about Eastwood's character in this crisp, deceptively simple story of life in an ethnically changing neighborhood in a Detroit suburb. Clint plays Walt ("Don't call me Wally") Kowalski, a grumpy, bigoted Korean War vet who has spent his working life on the auto assembly lines, and is spending his retirement growling from his front porch at the Asian immigrants who are taking over his block. He has a couple of upwardly mobile sons (Brian Haley and Brian Howe) and some indolent adolescent grandchildren whom he keeps at a mutually agreeable arms length. As the movie opens, he is laying to rest his beloved wife of many years in a Catholic ceremony that is clearly honoring her wishes rather than his own inclinations. The wake at his house that follows is balanced by a party next door for a Hmong newborn, a juxtaposition that avoids heavy-handedness while framing the evolution of the neighborhood, and the country.
The vintage, lovingly-cared-for Gran Torino under a tarp in his garage epitomizes the old America in which Walt's heart and values are rooted. He has very little use for much of anything in this modern world – not his sons and their families, not the Church and the youthful, apple-cheeked Father Janovich (Christopher Carley), and certainly not the "slopes" and "gooks" who are changing the face of his decent old Polish neighborhood. The feeling from his new next-door neighbors is mutual; the Asian grandmother rocks on the porch glaring at Walt, spitting tobacco, and wondering in subtitled Hmong why the old white guy doesn't just take the hint and move away.
Walt packs a lot of firepower in his house, and brandishes it freely when his space is invaded. When a tussle between Asian gang members and Thao (Bee Yang), the Hmong teenage boy next door, spills over onto his property, Walt comes out loaded for bear, snarling "Get off my lawn!" For saving Thao he becomes, unwittingly and unwillingly, a hero of sorts to the Asian community he despises.
There is a predictability in the journey of this story, as Walt morphs from a crusty racist sonofabitch into a slightly mellower, more understanding crusty racist sonofabitch as he begins to see individuals behind the ethnic features. He thaws first toward Sue (Ahney Her), the teenage daughter of the Hmong neighbors (the Hmong are hill tribes whose homelands spread through mountainous parts of Southeast Asia) when he rescues her from a black gang in vintage Dirty Harry fashion. Sue persuades him to come over for a Hmong barbecue, and he angrily mutters to the mirror his realization that "I have more in common with these gooks" than he does with his own family. Eventually, grudgingly, he takes young Thao under his wing, and a curious father-son relationship develops.
But although there are familiar clichés in this picture, Eastwood is such a savvy director that he gives them freshness. Sometimes his direction gets a little obvious, sometimes he indulges his own character in a cartoonish slow burn. But it all feels right within this tradition of filmmaking You root for Walt to stand his ground, not to give in to pressures of Church, age, political correctness, and family, not to compromises with his own fierce, stubborn iconoclasm. His racism is an equal opportunity bigotry that Eastwood shows as not admirable but at least un-hypocritical. And in one enormously entertaining scene he takes young Thao to the barbershop run by his friend Martin, an Italian-American with whom Walt routinely exchanges ethnic insults. The visit is to teach Thao how to "man up" – to enter into the bluff, acerbic, but healthily friendly give-and-take that allows some fun to be had out of the differences that define and link us in this country.
Though it deals with racial tensions, and ends with a melodramatically violent cataclysm, Gran Torino is as much a comedy as anything else, and the comedy is bracing and funny. Eastwood elicits wonderful performances from his partly non-professional cast, and brings his own special easy grace to his first on-screen role since Million Dollar Baby five years ago.
He has hinted that it may be his last. And as such, it's tempting to read Walt Kowalski as a kind of valedictory to his great career rogue's gallery of characters, from Rowdy Yates to The Man with No Name, to Dirty Harry, to Unforgiven's Bill Munny and Heartbreak Ridge's Sgt. Highway, and all the other gruff, succinct, tough guys he's put into the American myth.
As we enter that annual cultural frenzy of movie awards season, Gran Torino isn't likely to figure as a major player. But it would do the creators of many of today's cinematic objets d'art good to sit down and watch the smooth, crankily sentimental old-fashioned movie deftness with which one of Hollywood's masters works.
By Kirk Honeycutt
Bottom Line: Clint Eastwood delivers one of his rare comic performances in a film that otherwise doesn't measure up to his recent outstanding works.
So now we know what became of Dirty Harry.
In "Gran Torino," Clint Eastwood plays a retired auto worker in Michigan who could literally stand in for his iconic character a quarter of a century later. Crotchety as hell and a gun never far from his side, Harry -- sorry, Walt Kowalski -- lives a sullen, solitary life in a deteriorating blue-collar neighborhood where nonwhite and immigrant faces constantly irritate him. Indeed everything from the rundown funk of the 'hood to his blase grown children and their punk kids irritates him. A scowl chiseled into his gruff, stony face, he spits foul-mouthed commentary and racial epithets from the side of his mouth about everyone he sees.
Eastwood has always had the gift for comedy in his acting repertoire, but he indulges in it only rarely. His fans might embrace this return to comedy, but those expecting something more in the vein of recent Eastwood incarnations as an actor ("Million Dollar Baby") or director ("Changeling," "Letters From Iwo Jima") may be in for a disappointment. So it's up to Warner Bros. marketing to make that distinction prior to release for "Gran Torino" to gain boxoffice traction.
The movie itself, directed by Eastwood and written by Nick Schenk (from a story he wrote with Dave Johannson), is an unstable affair given to overemphasized points and telegraphed punches. It lacks the subtlety of Eastwood's recent efforts, but then again, the film must be seen in the mode of "Dirty Harry reunites with his 'Every Which Way but Loose' orangutan" -- only this time it's an aging dog named Daisy.
Seated on his immaculate front porch with a steady supply of beer, Walt stews in the bile of his own hatred of anything contemporary seasoned with bitter, soul-shattering memories of the Korean War. He acknowledges Hmong neighbors only with a sneer until the next-door kid tries to steal his beloved 1972 Gran Torino.
