AK's Movie Reviews: Gran Torino

If Gran Torino is indeed Clint Eastwood's last film as he claims it is, then it is a simultaneously fitting yet disappointing to his great career. It's fitting in the sense that Eastwood puts just about every aspect of his career on the screen. It's an amalgamation of all his famous onscreen personalities: Cowboy, conservative vigilante, outlaw, loner, curmudgeon with a heart of gold and bad-ass action hero. What makes the film disappointing is that all of these personalities don't blend together to make a consistent film. There's perhaps too much of Eastwood on display and the parts of his persona that don't work distract from what could have been a great film.

Eastwood (who also directed himself) stars as Walt Kowalski, a Korean War veteran and former Ford assembly line worker whose wife just passed away. He is probably saddened by her passing but displaying emotion would uncover his facade of hostility towards pretty much everything. Kowalski spends most of his days sitting on his front porch, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes and studying his surroundings with a glare in his eyes. His human interaction is mostly limited to exchanging racial jabs with his longtime barber or having brief phone conversations with his son. The son is a very unfortunate character in the film. His presence is manipulative and unnecessary; he exists to express disdain for his father or to try and take advantage of him. I imagine that the son was included to try and generate sympathy for the main character but we already feel something for Walt and the involvement of his son seems thrown in for the purposes of melodrama. There is also a priest who tries to involve himself in Walt's life. The priest wants Walt to confess his sins as a means of coping with his wife's death but Walt feels his sins (particularly the ones he committed in Korea) are beyond the point of possible redemption.

One night Walt is awakened by a noise in his house. He goes to the garage to find a young boy attempting to break into his prized Gran Torino (a car that he built himself off the assembly line and works on every day of his life). The boy his Thao (played by Bee Vang) a local teenager from the largely Asian-American neighborhood in which Walt resides. Thao soon finds himself staring down the barrel of Walt's shotgun but scrambles away. It turns out that trying to steal the car was part of an initiation into a local gang; one which Thao doesn't necessarily want to join but in his neighborhood it's generally the way of life for young males. This leads to an incident in which the gang harasses Thao outside of Walt's house and they soon become the ones staring down the wrong end of Walt's gun. Walt's act of driving off the game is seen as a very noble one to his neighbors and they soon begin to flood his front porch with gifts that he wants nothing to do with. The gang was simply on his property and he has no tolerance for that kind of thing.

Thao offers his services to Walt as a mean of forgiveness. He will work as much as possible doing whatever Walt asks in order to make up for the attempted theft. They form a unique bond and this leads to some of the more touching and poignant moments in the film. Walt is persuaded to accept Thao into his life partially due to Thao's sister Sue (the young actress Ahney Her in a wonderfully charming performance). She sees through Walt's facade and is capable of jabbing back at him. This in turn leads to Walt seeing potential in Thao. He sees the boy as a hard worker and knows that he could make a real man out of him. There's a great scene in which Walt takes Thao to the barbershop in order to teach him how to talk like a man. That scene not only has some great comic timing but is crucial to the development of Thao's character. Walt's methods may seem a little backwards but there are something to be learned from him. The unlikely relationship between Walt and the two young Asian children are the heart of the film. Where the film steps wrong is with the involvement of the gang.

There are several confrontations between Walt and the gang members throughout Gran Torino and they stick out like a sore thumb. Eastwood channels The Man With No Name and Dirty Harry simultaneously, wields a gun, glares menacingly and spouts one-liners that make "Do you feel lucky? Do you punk?" seem subtle and restrained by comparison. These scenes are so over the top and so out of place within the rest of the film that they border on self-parody. They would seem right at home in an action film but most of this movie is a reflective character study so when Eastwood grouls sarcastic threats at gang members it causes unintentional laughter. Obviously Clint Eastwood's last film will require him to hold a gun at some point but his presence is strong enough that he could have done more with looks rather than words.

Eastwood's performance is, well, exactly that: a performance. He's never been a particularly deep actor and while he certainly tries hard in this film he's too unrestrained. You are fully aware that he is trying to act. Again, the scenes with the gang confrontations emphasize this even further as he tries to put conviction into his hard-ass lines but doesn't seem quite sure of himself. The film might honestly have worked better if it had been put in the hands of somebody who knew how to handle Eastwood as an actor but at Eastwood's age he's probably certain that nobody but himself is right for the job.

The climax of the film (which I wouldn't dare to reveal) involves Walt making a crucial decision and the consequences of that decision. I found it to be very predictable and tidy and the problem with the ending furthers the glaring problem with the rest of the film: it emphasizes violence over character. I understand why the film ends the way it does, but it felt hollow and it's not as moving or emotional as it thinks it is.

Gran Torino is by no means a bad film. The scenes involving Walt's interactions with his barber, with Thao and with Sue contain some splendidly poignant film-making. The distractions are glaring but the great stuff in the film makes up for it up until the unsatisfying conclusion. I think the main reason that the film ends the way it does is because of Clint Eastwood. If this is his last film it makes sense that he would end his film career on the note that he does. There are themes of tolerance and redemption throughout the film but ultimately I feel it's about Clint coming to terms with the end of his career and putting himself at the center of everything. If the medium is the message then the message is Clint Eastwood. Perhaps he has earned the right to have a large ego and to fill his last film with it but the problem is that Eastwood's ego keeps a good film from being great. It's the humanity that makes Gran Torino work, not the power of its star.