A Review of the Movie Gran Torino

The most recent movie I have seen is Gran Torino starring Clint Eastwood, as Waltz Kowalski. Eastwood is one of my all time favorite actors. Not having read any reviews about this movie but hearing a lot of hype about it, I decided to spend big bucks to go and see it at a first run movie theatre. Usually I wait until the movie goes to Cineplex where it is half price. Call me cheap, that's okay but a movie and popcorn these days cost about $20.00.

Anyway, it took me a while to get into the movie, to know what it is all about. I did not care for the blatant racist and sexist overtone throughout the movie. Granted it is set during the Korean War era but to bring up these age old stereotypes and myths to me is like reinforcing old values and infecting the young all over again.

Kowalski had just lost his wife and his children were trying to get him to consider moving into a senior's home - away from what appeared to be an Asian ghetto. Kowalski would hear nothing of it. He played the role of a miserable, rude and totally incorrigible old man who was difficult to get close to and more difficult to please. Whatever his son did was wrong and Kowalski never paid him the time of day. His pride and joy was his 1972 Gran Torino which was kept in an immaculate condition and showed off regularly in the front yard. Kowalski had caught his grand daughter admiring the car during his wife's funeral reception at the home. She was hoping that she would inherit the car when her grandfather died or that he would give it to her but grand dad just huffed and puffed at her.

Clint Eastwood is excellent at playing the part of a grumpy old Korean War veteran with a steely veneer. He chewed tobacco and sat on his front porch with his rifle at his side and curses his neighbors who were Hmong people and the Asian youths who passed by his home and who in his mind were taking over his Detroit neighborhood. He longed for the old days when the neighborhood was mostly white. One of his neighbors, an old woman from the Hmong family next door was just as hateful as Eastwood, she spoke in her language saying why was he hanging around there, why didn't he move out of the neighborhood like the rest of white people while Eastwood was saying why don't they go back to their country and neither quite understood what the other was saying but understood clearly through body language. This part was quite funny to watch and was one of the highlights of the movie for me - watching the interaction between these two people from different backgrounds who did not understand each other except through body language - that is powerful.

Kowalski could not forget the experience of the Korean War and nursed the grudges and prejudices he held against Asians and did not want to be close to them but was not prepared to move out of the neighborhood either. He figured he was there first so they should get out.

There were a couple young Hmong children next door. The young woman, Sue, played by Ahney Her, was assertive and friendly. She reached out to the old Kowalski, inviting him to their functions on several occasions until he caved in and enjoyed their tasty Asian cuisine. Her brother, Thao played by Bee Vang, on the other hand, was a quiet introvert and the target of other Hmong kids in the neighborhood who wanted him to be inducted into their gang. They cajoled him to do something daring like stealing the old man's Gran Torino. That was a big mistake and went very badly. He was caught. In Hmong custom, the boy had to pay for his sin and regain his family's honor by working it off. In the course of that experience Kowalski and Thao developed a friendship and Kowalski decided to take Thao under his wings and mentor him into manhood. Kowalski became Thao's protector which eventually cost him his life but not before changing his own life for the better, I think.

While the movie had some good moments, it pulled no emotional strings in me. I could not find a clear message in this movie. What was it trying to say to me? - That scars are buried deep in war veterans? That killing impacts both victim and victor? The movie left me wanting, as if it was not complete. Maybe it is in that doubt and uncertainty the message lies. Life is not a neat little package.