Gran Torino

dir. Clint Eastwood

Jan. 22, 2009

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Dirty Harry has threatened his last minority offender. “Gran Torino,” like so many other latter-day Clint Eastwood pictures, takes our assumptions of who the on-screen Eastwood is supposed to be, and upends them, but not so much that he doesn’t get to grit his teeth and whip out a firearm now and again. And that’s a problem.

With the exception of a guy named John Wayne, no other actor in film history has remained a viable box office commodity for as long as Eastwood has - his first screen appearance was in “Revenge of the Creature” in 1955 (!) - but his need to toy with the audience is always hindered by his less adventurous desire to crank out hit movies, to make crowd pleasers.

“Gran Torino” is a crowd-pleaser all right. It’s just that the bluntness needed to satisfy grassroots America robs it of the moral complexity Eastwood and screenwriter Nick Schenk are straining to achieve. The most important shot in the movie is the one that its director fires into his own foot.

Eastwood stars, for what he insists will be the final time, as Walt Kowalski, a racist, embittered Korean War veteran whose beloved wife has died, leaving him with little more than memories, his lovingly cared-for 1972 Ford Gran Torino, and a seemingly insurmountable hatred of everyone who isn’t Walt Kowalski. Walt’s family, including his son and daughter-in-law (Brian Haley and Geraldine Hughes), are exasperated by the old man’s bile toward them, but if you consider that both they and their children are written as wide-eyed middle-class nincompoops, it’s easy to side with Walt in this instance. Again, though, this particular widower is an equal opportunity despiser.

The opening act largely focuses on proving Walt is a grumpy old prick, and it achieves its goal. After snarling at his friends and family during the post-funeral gathering, he aggressively belittles Father Janovich (Christopher Carley), a young priest who comforted Walt’s wife in her final days. She asked Janovich to convince Walt, who doesn’t abide by the church, to go to confession after she dies, but Walt is having none of it. Later, we discover he’s also having none of the family of Hmong immigrants who live next door, and that’s where the supposed complexity kicks into gear.

Walt can still remember when this was a nice neighborhood. Now, though, houses are falling apart, lawns are unkempt, and gangs of armed youths cruise the streets. So it’s little surprise that he views his very foreign neighbors as just another step in the collapse of the world he once knew.

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One night, when Thao (Bee Vang), the quiet teen in the Hmong family, is forced to try to steal Walt’s Gran Torino as the initiation into a street gang that he deeply wants to avoid, Walt’s world changes. Thao doesn’t get the car, but later, when the gang shows up in Thao's front yard wielding weapons, Walt, who’s stared down his share of barrels, appears with his shotgun and saves the kid.

This makes Walt an unwilling hero in the Hmong community; old ladies start appearing on his doorstep with offerings of flowers. Walt is eventually invited by Thao’s tough-cookie sister, Sue (Ahney Her), to a family gathering, and, after enjoying an afternoon of Hmong cooking and conversation, Walt enters into a hedging relationship with the family, and Thao in particular. With this deepening bond, however, comes responsibilities, and that gang isn’t going anywhere. Can Walt find it in his heart and guts to protect a group of people he previously only sneered at when he saw them in their driveway?

                                                ***

When that’s all written out on the page, it seems like a far more gripping movie than the one Eastwood ended up making. There are a number of stumbling blocks in “Gran Torino,” and they’re the same ones I see in a lot of other Eastwood pictures that people feel compelled to praise as masterpieces, simply because they aren’t regurgitated doses of more of the same.

Good for Eastwood that this isn’t just another shoot-em-up, that he’s once again attempting to convey something more complicated that an empty bullet clip. But it’s an awkward, largely failed attempt, more of a gesture toward a great commercial movie than the actual thing.

To begin with, the script is written like a revved-up “After School Special.” Walt is the Mean Guy, and you’ve got the Good Kids next door, and the Bad Kids down the block. And Racism, as we all know, is Extra Bad. So you toss in Walt - who Eastwood portrays as some kind of cartoon bulldog; he literally growls when he’s angry - and every time a point is made, it sounds like a hammer hitting an anvil.

The gang confrontation scenes are enjoyable in a crude sort of way, because who doesn’t like to see an angry senior citizen tell a vicious young thug to go fuck himself? But that’s pushing a very primitive button, and the buzz of it doesn’t last all that long before we’re back to being lectured about whatever subject drives a particular scene. Eastwood - and, again, this is emblematic of his directing style - doesn’t like to imply anything that can be recited like a pledge. Like Spike Lee, his characters often speak in pamphlets.

The best scenes, oddly enough, are the comic ones. That afternoon visit when Walt discovers he really loves Hmong cuisine is sweet and openhearted; it helps a lot that Eastwood is finally able to tone down the angry glare for a few minutes. But even that gets marred by blunt verbal descriptions of the Hmong lifestyle that sound like they’re being read out of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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The kicker, though, is a string of awkward performances that smack of amateurism. I don’t even have to do any research to tell you that Bee Vang has never been in front of a camera before, and the same probably goes for Ahney Her. They don’t deliver their dialogue so much as they recite it, and, frankly, there are instances when Eastwood isn’t much better. He’s once again over-rasping, as if he’s running out of oxygen, and the hissing and growling thing doesn’t do him any favors.

It’s unfortunate if this really is the final performance of Eastwood's remarkable career. He’s been a great movie star for longer than most people reading this can remember, but by this point, he’s a sturdy American product running on fumes. Finally putting it in the garage after all these years won’t change what he’s accomplished, and directing seems to be where his heart is at these days anyway.

“Gran Torino” contains a slew of racial slurs, profanity, and violence. Note that Eastwood mumble-croons the song that plays over the end credits, but he’s done that before. Check out his wheezy vocal stylings in “Play Misty for Me” and “The Beguiled,” if you dare. Or just watch “The Beguiled” because it’s goddamned bizarre, and really entertaining. Rated R. 116 minutes, and that’s way too long.

Paul Tatara

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