Review: Gran Torino

Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) is a son of a bitch, and a particularly racist one at that. Having just endured his wife's funeral, Walt wants only to scowl and growl in solitude, left alone to simmer and seethe over past Korean War traumas and at the proliferation of Asian "swamp rats" and "zipperheads" who've infiltrated his Michigan community. But no, instead he's forced to suffer the grating company of his two idiot sons - the younger one even sells Japanese cars, which Walt, a lifetime Detroit car factory employee, takes as a direct insult - and their selfish, disrespectful kids, one of whom shows up to the services in a football jersey and another decked out in a midriff that reveals a belly button ring. Pesky, no good brats - grrrr. And then, once those blood-related twits have finally left him to his own grumpy devices, his tranquil, solitary existence is rudely interrupted by quiet, teenage next door neighbor Thao (Bee Vang), who has the nerve to try to steal his prized mint-condition 1972 Gran Torino. It's enough to make a man pick up his well-oiled wartime rifle and shoot some minorities, a plan Walt fails to complete (but not for lack of trying) and then ditches after discovering, a couple of nights later, Thao and his family being harassed by some local gangbangers.

What follows in Gran Torino, Eastwood's second directorial effort this season (after Changeling) and supposedly last starring gig, is in a certain sense merely old-fashioned Hollywood melodrama, as crotchety Walt slowly warms to, and protects from thugs, his non-Caucasian surrogate-family neighbors -- who are Hmong, an ethnic group from the mountain regions of Laos, Thailand and China -- while at the same time finding inner peace through open-minded compassion.

Yet if the film is a standard-issue redemption saga, it's also one of significant, deceptive weight, in large part because its preoccupation with the burden and self-destructive ramifications of violence is given acute resonance by Eastwood's presence. Walt is an old warrior still nursing the painful scars of his battlefield experiences, hardened to react to life in curt, brutal ways, a loaded firearm and accompanying gritted-teeth glare always at the ready. His tale is, in essence, the same one Eastwood has been telling for years, a genre meditation on inner and outward hostility that plays like a knowing, seriocomic hybrid of Unforgiven and The Outlaw Josey Wales, with a steady stream of intolerant invectives -- shades of John Ford's The Searchers, with the exaggerated epithet-laced humor at all times coming at Walt's expense -- thrown in for good measure.

Despite a lower-middle-class urban setting and his cranky geriatric self positioned front and center-frame, Eastwood explicitly casts Gran Torino as a Western (or, rather, neo-Western), and not simply because it includes a few weapons-drawn standoffs and vicious cross-cultural tensions. Gunslinger Walt may live next door to Thao and his plucky sister Sue (Ahney Hur), but he's the strange outsider who figuratively waltzes into town and rights the wrongs of an aggrieved, fatherless clan, who in turn embrace him as their paternal guardian. Eastwood doesn't strain this fundamental spiritual relationship to his past works (both his iconic Man With No Name spaghetti efforts and his latter, more self-reflective examinations of violence's consequences) any more than he underlines the Western clichés - priest, barbershop as masculine haven, female whose dignity (read: sexual purity) must be defended and, ultimately, avenged - that fill out Nick Schenk's script. Nonetheless, it's these elements which most stirringly elevate the proceedings, as Eastwood's legacy as one of cinema's preeminent killing-machine heroes brings decades' worth of hefty baggage to Walt's slow, obstinate struggle to wrestle with not only his bloody past but his responsibility in allowing it to define his conventional, dutiful, seemingly miserable life.

Eastwood's sunset performance is a thing of recognizable badass gruffness save for the crusty, nasty xenophobic slurs that are imbedded in his speech as deeply as the lines in his face. And its workmanlike effectiveness, like that of his formal direction, is due not simply to its classicism but also to the canny self-consciousness of its delivery. With a deftness not glimpsed in Changeling, Eastwood the director vacillates on a dime between understated pathos (a third act-initiating zoom into Walt's bloody-knuckled hand at the appearance of an assaulted innocent) and wink-wink comedy (a quick zoom into Walt's trembling-with-fury mug at his son's suggestion of a nursing home). The result is a story that, for all its gawkier elements -- the sometimes artificial father-son rapport between manly Walt and wimpy Thao, the one-dimensional villains -- strikes a stable balance between straightforward sincerity and self-awareness. It's a description that similarly fits Eastwood's headlining turn, which delivers the squinty-eyed, don't-tread-on-me menace of his High Plains Drifter avenger while, through a shift in body language or sudden glance of the eyes, subtly colors that persona in decidedly melancholy, remorseful ways. Think of it as the latest, and perhaps final, chapter (after Unforgiven, A Perfect World and Million Dollar Baby) of a golden-years project of reckoning with his violence-exploiting blockbuster heyday. And, also, as a pretty powerful film to boot.