GRAN TORINO: The good, the bad and the grumpy

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/01/2009 (6342 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One of the most utilized items in Clint Eastwood’s thespian toolbox is an expression he employs to denote slow-burning rage.

In his acting career, Eastwood has often employed that look — an icy glare/thin-lipped sneer combo that says: I simply can’t believe you’re messing with me.

In his latest self-directed film, Eastwood whips it out with unprecedented frequency in the role of retired autoworker Walt Kowalski. And he employs it for relatively trivial offenses.

At his wife’s funeral, Walt glares at his granddaughter, who is wearing an inappropriate midriff-baring outfit, as if she were some perp set free from a felony beef because of a legal technicality. When his son and daughter-in-law show up with brochures for a retirement home, Walt glowers at them as if they were a couple of frontier malcontents molesting the schoolmarm.

Mostly, Walt uses it on his Asian next-door neighbours, who have, in his eyes, helped hurl his once respectable Detroit neighbourhood into mouldering decline. A Korean war vet, Walt has particular issues with Asians. But he is an equal-opportunity bigot whose use of racial epithets is the only thing about him that could be termed liberal.

Walt’s attitude gets adjusted, however, after he confronts a teenager in his garage late one night. As a gang initiation, Walt’s neighbour Thao (Bee Vang) has been assigned the task of stealing Walt’s treasured, mint-condition 1972 Gran Torino. The retiree, armed with his M-1 rifle, scares the lad off.

But he shoulders the weapon again when the gangsters try to pull Thao from his home, bringing the resulting fracas onto Walt’s front lawn. Walt chases the punks away (as much with the glare as with the M-1) and becomes a hero to the neighbours, and to all the Hmong people in the neighbourhood.

He rejects their gifts at first, but eventually reaches a rapport with Thao’s impertinent older sister Sue (Ahney Her). She gives Walt a lesson in the history of the Hmong, who were essentially driven out of Southeast Asia after supporting the Americans in the Vietnam War. She sufficiently charms Walt that she convinces him to make her fatherless brother work off his debt, and in that process, Walt takes the kid under his wing to "man him up" for life in Detroit’s mean streets.

That choice results in some funny repartee. You wouldn’t know it to look at the Grumpy Old Vigilante movie poster, but Gran Torino, scripted by Nick Schenk, is easily Eastwood’s funniest film.

But violence does rear its ugly head, and Walt participates to the extent that the conflict between his neighbours and the street gang escalates to ugly proportions.

But at the age of 78, Eastwood is no longer inclined to push the buttons of retributive justice as he might have done in the Dirty Harry days. In fact, Walt bears psychological scars from his Korean War experience a half a century after the fact, and simply blowing away hoodlums, something Harry Callaghan wouldn’t have hesitated to do, is not an option he takes lightly.

Indeed, with its implicit renunciation of Harry’s make-my-day ethos, Gran Torino may be to Eastwood’s Dirty Harry cycle what Unforgiven was to his westerns: a thoughtful reconsideration of the genre’s reactionary assumptions. Behind Eastwood’s icy glare, apparently, the man’s heart is thawing.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

MovieReview
Gran Torino
Starring Clint Eastwood
Globe, Grant Park, Polo Park, St. Vital.
14A
4 out of five stars

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