Gran Torino: A Classic Story of Tragic Heroism

 My mother has a story about Clint Eastwood that she loves to tell. Before I was but a twinkle in her eye, she and my father were dining at a restaurant that Eastwood owned—The Hog's Breath Inn in Carmel, California—when the famous actor's arrival was announced by a barrage of camera flashes as he made his way inside to sit with a few friends and socialize. The tale climaxes when Clint Eastwood turns to my mother and flashes her a smile. It was a big deal, because Clint Eastwood was a big deal then—and he is now. For many people, the archetypal Wild West anti-hero will always be the first thing to come to mind when they hear his name, but they will continue to remember his name because that's not all that he has been. Clint Eastwood's performance in Gran Torino—which he also directed and produced—maintains the iconic masculinity for which he is renowned, without the eyeball-popping testosterone-injected action a film needs to be considered “heart-pounding” these days. Eastwood's authentic gristle-and-bone acting from another era complements the understated action of Gran Torino, clearly demonstrating to anyone who had a shadow of a doubt that he is more than just a shoot-em-up cowboy.

 That is not to say that Clint Eastwood is no longer a Western star at heart, or that he does anything revolutionary in Gran Torino. Nick Schenk and Dave Johannson's story has the feel of a modern-day Western, something that Eastwood was undoubtedly drawn to; outlaws roll into town to beat up on the helpless locals, and Walt Kowalski, embittered widower and slur-spitting Korean War veteran, is the only one who can do anything about it. Walt—don't call him Wally—is a fearsome presence who is felt even when he's not on screen, and heard even when he gives only a guttural growl—or nothing at all. Eastwood plays him as the man who hates almost everything, and is surrounded and hounded by all that he hates: his family, his priest, and his Hmong neighbors, for whom he has ample colorful slurs to go through the entire movie without hardly ever repeating himself. But fate conspires to give him a chance at friendship with his teen aged neighbor Thao. Walt is naturally resistant to the unconventional friendship that eventually blossoms between himself and Thao, but Eastwood takes it further and keeps his character from really changing all that much as a result of his unexpected friendship. In the end, Walt is still the most crotchety man on the face of the Earth, still calls it like he sees it, and still only does what he thinks is right—it's not Disney, and it shouldn't be. Eastwood still gives a compelling, dramatically charged performance, complimented by cinematography and a soundtrack, unfettered by flashiness, that leaves nothing overbearing to interpose itself between the audience and the story.

 There is so much to say about Eastwood and his character because that's really who this movie is about, sometimes at the expense of making other characters look like tools designed to polish facets of Walt's character, or throw in some informative political correctness to counterbalance the torrent of racial epithets. But Eastwood makes it easy to sympathize with Walt in spite of his faults, which ensures that Gran Torino will do for Clint Eastwood what it did for Walt Kowalski; give him a perspective on life and death in his last years, and set him apart from the man he once was—and they both are the better for it.