Gran Torino was the biggest and most pleasant surprise of 2008, a film which, based on the trailer, I was not expecting to like at all. Believe it or not, despite a plot that touches on everything from racism to gang warfare, Gran Torino is that rarest of Clint Eastwood films — a comedy. “I’ve been called a lot of things,” Eastwood’s character says in the movie, “but never funny.” Well, he better get used to it because Gran Torino was one of the most enjoyable, laugh-out-loud films I saw all year.
Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) is a miserly curmudgeon. And he likes it that way. Walt, who we see burying his wife during the opening credits, lives in a crime-ridden Detroit neighborhood that was once the model of suburbia but is now, in Walt’s eyes, overrun with Asian immigrants. The Korean War veteran, still haunted by the horrors of the battlefield, loathes his Hmong neighbors and is more than happy to show it. His self-absorbed children are continually needling him about moving from his white-picket fenced house where a substantial American flag billows in the breeze into a retirement home for active senior citizens.
When Thao (Bee Vang), a troubled Hmong teen from next door, attempts to steal Walt’s prized Gran Torino as part of a gang initiation rite, the old man and his trusty M-1 rifle catch him in the act. Thao is forced by his family to do penance but Walt wants nothing to do with the young, introverted troublemaker. That is until Thao’s older sister Sue (Ahney Her, who completely wins us over in spite of her inability to act) begins to wear him down. Despite a litany of profanity and racist bile aimed her way, Sue is utterly unflappable. And she can give as good as she gets. When Walt saves Thao from the same pack of hoodlums who put him up to stealing the car, he becomes a neighborhood celebrity and unlikely father figure, much to his chagrin. While Walt never sets out to confront the prejudice in his life, it is dispelled nonetheless as he discovers that he has far more in common with the foreigners next door than his own flesh and blood.
Gran Torino, which follows hard on the heels of Eastwood’s Changeling, is a quasi-fable. To insist on strict reality and a lack of contrivance is to miss out on everything that the film, which cuts a satisfying road between drama and comedy, has to offer.
Eastwood’s Walt is a larger than life comic caricature, an AARP Dirty Harry. Eastwood doesn’t act in this movie, he growls. Walt has no inner monologue, constantly speaking aloud his innermost thoughts for all, or at least the audience, to hear. Eastwood, who continues to direct but no longer acts, came out of retirement for Gran Torino and it’s not hard to see why. There is quite literally no one else who could have portrayed Walt; every line had to have been written specifically for Eastwood to speak. Sure, other actors could have played the part but they could not have inhabited a character who owes everything to Eastwood’s persona and cinematic legacy. It is precisely this dialogue that makes the film so prescient.
Walt is the conduit through which Clint Eastwood is able to address his body of work, a pantheon of classic, tough-guy films that the actor has seemed to grow increasingly disturbed by with the passage of years. Just as his masterful Unforgiven chastised the thoughtless violence of his spaghetti westerns, so too is Gran Torino an indictment on his earlier cop films. Gran Torino was a way for the 79-year-old to address his mortality and make amends at the same time. This comedy ends on a very serious note, as Eastwood puts his old persona out of its misery once and for all. If the giant of the cinema were never to step in front of a camera again, Gran Torino would be the quintessential denouement of a titanic career.
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.
