One blog. Two opinions. One zillion films.

Dave-

We’ve experienced this movie quite differently.  Although I see  caricature in the way Clint plays Walt, I also see a man of the sort I’ve known, and that makes Clint’s Walt Kowalski a character I responded to.  Many’s the time I’ve listened to people I otherwise respect use racial epithets.  Listening to that language, particularly if it is being aimed at a specific person, is horrible.   It springs from fear and insecurity.

Walt keeps the world at bay out of fear.  He’s not comfortable in his own skin. Speaking of tools, his drinking is a tool.  A tool to drown sorrows and pain.   Walt has lots of tools.  Whether they’re working for him or not is another matter.

I was moved by the story, the interactions.  I found this character sympathetic; he pays the ultimate price, after all.   Not a major film, perhaps, but one that will stick with me.  Bullets bounce off Clint, until they don’t.  If this is his last time starring in one of his films, it is a strong finish; much stronger than the last film he was involved with, Changeling.  Hooking up with Jolie for a movie that was, by most accounts, mediocre, when he expected fireworks, must have been disappointing.

What a filmography!   What contributions he’s made.   Clint Eastwood is many things, and one of the things he is is an American hero-action figure.

Tammy, after a few day’s thought I realize what I do and don’t like about Gran Torino. And it’s the same thing: Clint Eastwood has made an indie film!

I am amused by the movie’s amateurishness. The exact same movie made by a 23-year-old named Flint Northtree would be regarded as “a promising film debut.” There’s a lot of flatfooted acting in this movie; it is a generous Clint workfare program. His crack production company, shooting in a crumbling Detroit neighborhood, hired lots of locals. Gran Torino’s occasional clumsiness is part of its charm.

Conventional wisdom: “I can’t imagine any other actor in this role.” Well, I can. Walt Kowalski is a silly caricature; the silliness sometimes works, like in the exceptionally goofy men-talk-dirty barbershop scene. Still, we need (and get) lots of exposition and broad strokes to learn where Walt is coming from. A Gene Hackman or Robert Duvall would quietly plant a lot that of backstory deep inside our heads.

Clint is a Hollywood star here, looking aloof among his carefully posed, slightly crumpled cans of PBR.  You mentioned “ralphing a loogie.” No, he squeezes a lame stream of liquid through his lips with his cheeks; he does not shape a wad of goo on his tongue and let rip a vicious projectile. That’s ralphing a loogie.

By the same token, his stream of racist blather lacks bite. Clint plays it cutely: “I’m an actor acting, I don’t mean this.” When the real Walt Kowalskis let loose with their racist crap — and I heard plenty of it during this last election — their hostility is repulsive.

Which brings me back to a question from my previous post: how much of Gran Torino’s enjoyability depends on our Dirty Harry expectations?

Still, Gran Torino is refreshing, with its simple observations about how a man collects tools over a lifetime, about how good tools used well are a source of profound pleasure and, by the way, remain a key to civilization. There’s a great character in the next door neighbor Sue (first-timer Ahney Her), who is smart and who traverses her new-old, American-Hmong lives wisely. My favorite scene might be when she gets in the face of her would-be rapists with . . . deconstruction.

As you know, Clint Eastwood’s film Grand Torino shook me.  “I think I’m afraid of losing my parents,” was my exact quote.

Eastwood stars as Walt Kowalski, an aging and bigoted Korean War veteran; as the film opens we learn he’s just become a widower.  Standing guard by his wife’s coffin in a Midwest Catholic church, Walt stares down every attendee, glaring menacingly at his own grandchildren.  In his eyes, most folks are shallow, spoiled, greedy and stupid.   The emotional gap between him and his sons is wide as the Pacific.

Walt is alone on his islands.  There are two islands: his emotional island, protecting his history as a soldier in the Korean War, and the island of his house, a patch of property in an area once populated by a white working class, now primarily a neighborhood of Asian immigrants.  Clint doesn’t feel threatened by this, but he sure hates his neighbors.    He spits his chew out at the old grandmother, but she replies by ralphing up an even bigger loogie.

Eastwood’s examinations of war and its aftermath are poignant; in this film he sets up a story of redemption and renunciation.  As his pastor observes, Walt has much more knowledge of death than he does of life.   That changes during the course of the film, as Walt is transformed from antagonist to protector of the Hmong family next door.   Walt witnesses an escalating attack on the family by a neighborhood gang, stops it “Dirty Harry” style, and becomes their hero.  Only Clint Eastwood as Walt Kowalski could pull off building a caring relationship with immigrants even as he continues using every derogatory epithet in the book.

Walt realizes he has more in common with these Asians than he does with his own family.

His prized Gran Torino symbolizes a shining past Walt won’t let go.  Everyone in his life lusts after that car; his grandchildren tolerate their grandfather only because of the things he may bequeath.

There is violence, and evidence of violence.  The movie ends powerfully, but not unexpectedly.  The choices Walt makes in order to rectify his Korean War actions while protecting his neighbors save all the right people, and punish those deserving punishment.

One of my favorite lines: “Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while that you shouldn’t have messed with? That’s me.”

I love that Walt’s dog is named “Daisy.”  Vietnam war protestors placed daisies in rifle barrels, as a symbol of peace.

I’m not certain whether to reveal the ending.  This movie is strung tight as a wire, and I hate to snap it prematurely for those who have yet to see this film.   There’s some huge symbolism in those closing shots.  Catch it?

T.

Tammy,

My cavalier attitude about spoilers is stifled here. When was the last time you saw a movie with as powerful an ending as Gran Torino? Not a fancy-doodle concoction like The Sixth Sense but a story that cares to concern itself with recognizable humans and a relatively realistic look at the cost of violence?

Gran Torino unfolds slowly, a trace haphazardly. I thought Clint Eastwood’s Archie Bunker routine was a one-note dang deal. (See that single tear? There’s his Oscar nom!) It’s too bad that Clint the director didn’t tell Clint the actor to milk more of the humor written into the script.

Clint is getting raves for his performance — pure sentimentality, for he can’t even chug a PBR the way a real Walt Kowalski would — but at least in middle section he softens one single iota for some good laughs. I mean, Walt literally growls. Time and again. Props to the writer, Nick Schenk, for realizing the magic in “get off my lawn” before it became John McCain’s unofficial campaign slogan.

Quibbling aside, this is the rare Hollywood movie that burrows into where alpha-male traits take young men, for the good or otherwise. A couple of weeks ago, when dinner conversations turned to the movies, I’d smirk, “It looks like they finally made a movie where Clint Eastwood guns down thugs.” Well, I take that wisecrack back. I think Witness is the last time a gun-saturated Hollywood movie struck such a thoughtful chord in the final reel. (There’s an interesting story about that startling climax told to me by one of the performers. I’ll share it later.)

So a question, Tammy: since we were both rather impressed by the climax of Gran Torino, how much of that is due to our Dirty Harry expectations?