Review: Gran Torino (4/5)

Gran Torino
(Clint Eastwood):
Clint Eastwood, Christopher Carley, ...
Running time: 116 minutes.

In human years, Clint Eastwood is a towering 78. But in Hollywood legend, he is as old as mythology. In a staring contest between Clint and a Cyclops, you know who would be picking up the bar tab. Gran Torino is the new film directed by and starring Eastwood and it’s a chrome-looking, all-purpose vehicle. Like the sleek 1972 sports car of the title, it revs up into the fast-moving, nervous territory of the action hero movie. But it’s also happy to drive along at cruise speed, the typical pace of an Eastwood drama.
Ostensibly, it’s the story of Walk Kowalski (Eastwood), a bigoted war veteran who comes to find an unlikely redemption late in life. But it’s also as much about Clint Eastwood, his iconic status, and his advancing years. Gran Torino is also the most unlikely comedy this year. “I’ve been called a lot of things,” Walt growls at one point. “But never funny.” He’s hilarious. He deserves a silver star for single-handedly storming the political correctness brigade. He lobs racial stereotypes like he was back in Korea throwing grenades. And they’re funny because the film shows they are patently empty. The humour and the drama in Gran Torino lies in watching Walt come to care for his nextdoor neighbours, an Asian family he initially despises, to the point that he wants to go out and fight for them.
Eastwood’s Walt is a crinkled curmudgeon. His mouth is sour at the corners. His face has curdled. The skin on his neck is folded like a concertina: when you squeeze him, he growls. At his wife’s burial, he glowers at his grandchildren, and ignores his sons. He’s followed about a baby-faced priest (Christopher Carley), who is determined to wring a confession from him. But Walt gives it to him straight: “I think you're an overeducated 27-year-old virgin who likes to hold the hands of superstitious old ladies and promise them everlasting life.” It’s as if Dirty Harry’s Harry Callahan retired to mid-western Michigan and got old.
Walt flies the American flag on his porch. He fought for his country and worked for Ford all his life. Now, he finds himself patronised by his grow-up children and marooned in his neighbourhood surrounded by immigrants. He catches nextdoor kid Thao (Bee Vang) trying to steal his prized Gran Torino. But he knows it’s not the kid’s fault. He’s being pressurized by a violent gang and Walt emerges as the only guy who will stand up to them.
The middle of picture is a charm. Walt chases a gang with just an old rifle off the lawn of his neighbours. They think he’s a hero. The sarcastic Sue (Ahney Her) and bookish Thao lure the grump from his lair. Soon he’s eating their food at a barbecue (“bring me another beer, dragonlady”) and starts lending Thao his tools. But tensions are simmering in the background. The gang, like an angry wasp, has not gone away.
Eastwood is happy to mine his own iconography. “Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while you shouldn't have f**ked with? That's me,” he says. He speaks with the deadly intent of a young man. He pulls a gun but it’s only his finger. Brazenly, he pretends to shoot gangsters with his bare hand. On his front lawn with his rifle pointed in the face of a gangbanger, he tells him: “I'll blow a hole in your face then go inside and sleep like a baby.” The problem with Walt, however, is that while he happy to play the hero, he does not sleep like a baby. His conscience is riddled with anxiety.
In some respects, the film is a perfect marriage of Eastwood’s career: we get the flinty figure of Eastwood the actor, and the keen, generous eye of Eastwood the director. He plays a game with the audience: he teases us with vigilantism, but really he wants to probe the troubled hero, men such as Walt, Harry Callahan or A Fistful of Dollars' The Man with no Name. Why is Walt such an angry bigot?
But there is a poignancy eating at the heart of Gran Torino too. For Walt, just like Eastwood, is an elderly man. He fills up with rage because he wants to do more than he physically can. He puts his fist through the kitchen presses in anger. Eastwood makes palpable the fury and impotence of growing old.
Gran Torino is by no means a perfect film. It’s crafted with Eastwood’s classical restraint and easy tracking shots, but it’s clunky at times with its actors. Still, it’s captivating. Walt hangs on to old ideas of his masculinity, much as we too cling to old ideas about Eastwood. Gran Torino is about letting go. It’s a requiem for retired gunslingers everywhere, a perfect swan song, should he so wish, for Eastwood’s own career.