Gran Torino (2008)

Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood, 2008)

In Sergio Leone's invaluable masterpiece The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), a very young Clint Eastwood plays an unnamed cowboy (popularly known as the Man with No Name), who in his pursuit for hidden treasure, involuntarily gets involved in the ongoing Civil War. In one scene, he witnesses firsthand the effects of war as he rides by fallen soldiers struggling to stay alive amidst mortal wounds and severe despair. Through death and suffering, Eastwood's unnamed cowboy sheds his familiar indifference to partially reveal his affiliation with humanity. A firsthand experience with the human condition pushes him out of the comfort of his chosen neutrality; and all at once, witnesses the repercussions of humanity in its most depraved. Whether or not the encounter causes a dent on a soul that has already been rendered callous by violence is out of the film's range. The Man with No Name rides into the sunset wealthier from the spoils of his adventure, and we can only guess whether he took with him the weight of his wary world.

More than four decades later, Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a Korean war veteran whose wartime experiences has turned him into a cynical fossil of a man. The inescapable internal and external hell that Walt struggles with seems to be the apt representative of the grim twilight of all of his famous onscreen personas' lives: The Man With No Name of Leone's popular spaghetti westerns, Inspector Harry Callahan of Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971) and its many sequels and offshoots, Bill Munny of Unforgiven (Eastwood, 1992), and to a certain degree, Franky Dunn of Million Dollar Baby (Eastwood, 2004), who share with Walt the edgy perspective in life would normally lead to a lifetime of repressed remorse, lest callousness has crept into the core of their souls to the point that redemption is no longer an option. Walt is observably, an embattled soul who in his old age, is still painfully struggling with the baggage created from a lifetime of accumulated and accumulating sins. It seems that there can be no redemption for Walt; yet the miracle of Eastwood's filmmaking in Gran Torino (which to my mind is one of Eastwood's better films in his career as a director and undoubtedly his best film in the past decade) is to seamlessly convince his audience of Walt's slow yet deliberate turnaround.

The film opens during the wake of Walt's recently deceased wife. His children, their wives, their sons and daughters, attend the ceremony in deference to mere blood relationship. The strain that defines the relationship between Walt and his family is more than apparent: Walt is constantly irritated by the antics of his grandchildren (he silently growls when he catches his grandsons play with his medal of honor; a more prominent though silent growl is expressed when his granddaughter is leading him to give his beloved memorabilia); and the latter repay his irritation with discomfort when in his presence; Walt is disappointed at his son for driving a Japanese-made car, and dismisses him and his wife from his house when they suggested on his birthday that he relocate to a retirement home. Walt is obviously living in a pit. He has no real relationship with anyone, especially after the death of his wife. His health is deteriorating. He is slowly being cornered in a neighborhood where he is obsolete and immaterial.

Walt is a caricature of classic American arrogance: mouthing racist mantras as he sees his formerly White neighborhood fill up with immigrants; embarrassing the novice parish priest as the latter convinces him to go into confession, lecturing the young priest on life and death based on his experiences; exchanging insults with the local barber, supposedly in good and friendly humor. The face of the America he has lived in, loved, and killed for is rapidly changing. His insistence on the America he knew has stunted his life, which primarily consists of him sulking in his front porch while drowning himself in beer or admiring his one treasure, his vintage Gran Torino. In a twist of fate, the Gran Torino, the one thing that represents his ideal America, becomes the spark that pushes him to befriend Thao (Bee Vang), his Hmong neighbor who he catches one night attempting to steal his car as part of the initiation rites for a gang he was coerced to join, and his family.

Absent from Gran Torino is the typical heavy-handedness and seriousness that often plagues Eastwood's directorial efforts. Eastwood treats the material with an irreverence that is refreshing and most surprisingly, quite fun. The story evolves from light and often comedic sketches that depict Walt's persistent intolerance (with Eastwood's over-the-top yet undeniably apt portrayal limited to growls, grimaces, and guttural utterances of profanities and indecent remarks) to a highly emotional morality play, where Walt, with all his ethical inadequacies, is forced to referee a delicate situation that he finds himself in the center of. The sudden gravity that develops midway through the film is unforced; instead, it lures the audience into an emotional involvement with the affairs of Walt, not totally different from the one achieved through the machinations of daytime soap, that escalates in a climactic scene that is resolved by Walt's mental prestidigitation that completes his redemption, something often wished for but hardly achieved by most of cinema's morally weathered figures.