gran-torino

Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) is a prick. He’s racist, obnoxious, bitter, tired, and cantankerous. It’s safe to say that Walt doesn’t even exist in reality anymore, having left civilization many years ago. He’s a veteran of the Korean War and, as we are introduced to him in Eastwood’s Gran Torino, he has just lost his wife. Walt’s family shows little respect for him, seemingly waiting for him to pass on so that they can begin dividing up his hard-earned possessions and getting on with their lives.

In his first starring role since 2004’s Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood is masterful at playing Kowalski. The entire picture revolves around this outdated, cruel, bitter man. It is a character study of the highest order, a deeply controlled masterpiece of life and death and belated peace. In some ways, this is Eastwood’s ultimate meditation on age.

Kowalski lives in a neighbourhood in Detroit that is rapidly changing. He is a retired Detroit autoworker, clinging to the past with both fists. After his wife’s funeral, he slowly becomes acquainted with the Hmong family next door. The teenage children of the family, Sue (Ahney Her) and Thao (Bee Vang), cross paths with Kowalski. Thao attempts to steal his prized vehicle, the titular Gran Torino, as part of a gang initiation. Sue reaches out to Walt after Thao is caught stealing the vehicle, inviting the aged neighbour over for a family meal after he saves her from an assault.

The film’s currents of race and family run deep, as Kowalski gradually becomes acquainted with the neighbouring Hmong family. He is welcomed into their lives, despite his obvious and open racism, and he becomes somewhat of a father figure to young Thao. But as Thao is continually pressured by the gang, things take a tragically violent turn and Walt must make a choice between life and death once and for all.

As a slice of American life, Gran Torino is a work of pure genius. Wrinkled, battered, ignored, weathered, tired, and broken, Walt Kowalski has little to live for. His family waits to pick his bones clean and he openly resents them. It is interesting, then, that Walt finds a new family of sorts in the most unlikely of places. Eastwood’s picture really is about family and sacrifice, as Walt’s definitive sacrifice at the end of the film emphasizes his belated contrition. It is the sacrament Father Janovich (Christopher Carley) worked so hard for.

Eastwood embodies Walt Kowalski as a sort of retired Dirty Harry, gritting his teeth and literally growling when things get a little bit too thick. Watch him as he turns the simple task of bringing chairs up from the basement into threatening act of intimidation. When we are first introduced to Walt, he is scowling. He’s probably been scowling his whole life and yet amazingly he managed to find a woman to love him. To create realism as it relates to the scenario that Kowalski actually can, somehow, be loved, Eastwood offers us a celestial sense of wit beneath the glower.

The Hmong people came from the mountains in Southeast Asia. Many Hmong refugees came to America in the mid-1970s after communist takeover in Laos. It is interesting that these particular people were selected as neighbours to Eastwood’s Kowalski, as their struggle to arrive at a peaceable life is persistently threatened by gangs and violence. They are able to move out of one dangerous place and immediately move into another in crumbling Detroit. The performers, including Bee Vang and Ahney Her, are marvellous.

Gran Torino is a tremendous picture. Clint Eastwood has hinted that this may be his last film as an actor and it represents a hell of a way to go out. He is as sturdy as ever, still more intimidating than a fleet of gangsters, but he manages to show a sense of brokenness at the same time. In many ways, Eastwood’s Walt is in a state of unending guilt and grief. Gran Torino’s undaunted keenness to survey such a state is courageous, truthful, and ultimately invigorating.

9.2/10

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