Film Review: Gran Torino

Gran Torino. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by Nick Schenk. With Clint Eastwood, Bee Vang, Ahney Her and Christopher Carley. (2008).

An Unlikeable Racist Learns to Live Again

You don’t often see a movie about a bitter, unrepentant old racist coot. These kind of foul-mouthed characters, spitting on the sidewalk and cursing every minority in town, are very hard to like.  Clint Eastwood pulls off a kind of miracle in humanizing and even transforming a man who is easy to hate.  Along the way we learn a few things about how he got that way.  While this is not a great movie, it is a good movie and it’s worth seeing just for Eastwood’s  performance. The weakness of the movie is that Eastwood’s performance is so out-sized that it dominates all other players, thus robbing it of some believability, nuance and balance.

Those Who Can’t Connect–Can Connect

Walt Kowalski, whose wife of many years has just died, sits on his front porch in a changing neighborhood in Detroit. He is surrounded by immigrant neighbors, mostly Hmong, and gang-bangers rule the scene.  Kowalski  drinks his beer and mutters obscenities at everyone who passes by.  He is stirred into action when he catches his next door neighbor, the Hmong teenager Tao, trying to steal his precious Gran Torino.  Before he knows it, this remote and angry man has become involved with his neighbors and emerges as a father figure, of sorts, to the hapless Tao, who has bungled his gang-banger initiation.

The Secrets of a War Never Healed Still Haunt the Present

Kowalski, Eastwood’s character, a man with nothing left to live for, slowly begins to find a new life  by investing himself in the lives of  Tao, and his sister Sue.  Gradually we come to learn about the secrets that Kowalski has been carrying since his early twenties when, as a young man he served in the Korean War, and saw and carried out more atrocities than any one person should ever have to.

It begins to make a crazy kind of sense why this man should have suppressed these memories after his return from war, why he harbored such hatred of minorities (i.e. the other), why he would never be able to reach out to his own sons and why he never felt truly alive in his life.  Ed Tick’s marvelous book, War and the Soul, which I reviewed for this blog, reveals how during war, so many men experience their soul leaving their body and never feel truly alive again.

Making Loving Choices for the Next Generation

The movie moves to a stunning climax, one that weaves many themes together: the need to think carefully instead of reacting quickly with violence;  what it means to be fully alive; choosing carefully so that young people are not saddled with violent actions for the rest of their lives.   Ultimately this is a about making the most loving choices for people you cherish. 

A New, More Colorful America

As the final credits roll a song is playing, a duet. You hear Clint Eastwood’s raspy voice singing about the Gran Torino and it fades out and then the younger actor, Bee Vang sings, as he drives the Gran Torino. The gift passes from the old man to the younger one.  The complexion of America is changing yes, but it is only more beautiful.

Thank you Clint for your humanity, in making this movie.

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