Film Review: Eastwood growls, gangs squirm in 'Gran Torino'

Photo by Warner Bros. Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures

Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) becomes a guardian to his Hmong neighbors (played by Bee Vang, Brook Chia Thao, Chee Thao and Ahney Her) in "Gran Torino."

With his voice the rasp of the handsaw that cut his cracked features from a stump of cedar and his pants as high as the front porch from which he surveys the supposed decline of "the old neighborhood," Clint Eastwood is a comic totem of American masculinity, movie stardom, intolerance and, ultimately, redemption in "Gran Torino."

The film is as solid as its star. It's an old-fashioned piece of moviemaking about change we can believe in: the renewal of America's promise as a melting-pot land of opportunity.

Photo by Warner Bros. Pictures

Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) becomes a guardian to his Hmong neighbors (played by Bee Vang, Brook Chia Thao, Chee Thao and Ahney Her) in "Gran Torino."

Gran Torino

Walt Kowalski, an iron-willed veteran living in a changing world, who is forced by his immigrant neighbors to confront his own long-held prejudices. The people ...

Rating: R for language throughout, and some violence

Length: 116 minutes

Released: December 19, 2008 Limited

Cast: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Carley, Bee Vang, Bee Vang, Brian Haley

Director: Clint Eastwood

Writer: Nick Schenk, Dave Johannson

More info and showtimes »

"I fix things," says Eastwood as newly widowed Walt Kowalski, a racist "Polack," decorated Korean War veteran, retired Detroit auto worker, Pabst Blue Ribbon guzzler and overall handyman who's so irascible he literally growls when displeased, like Mongo in "Blazing Saddles." He's Dirty Harry with an AARP discount: "Get off my lawn," he snarls, pointing a rifle at a neighborhood gangbanger and transforming a cliched expression of codgerly irritation into a septuagenarian update of "Go ahead, make my day."

Walt's pride in his tools and his work (his garage contains a lovingly maintained example of the title car) is a reflection of Eastwood's expert, no-nonsense craftsmanship as a filmmaker. Scripted by Nick Schenk, "Gran Torino" is the second Eastwood-directed movie to open in less than three months (the first was the more ambitious and less satisfying "Changeling"). Like a John Ford film, "Gran Torino" is sometimes wincingly corny in its depiction of a "lovable" curmudgeon with an almost morbid obsession with ethnic identity; but its bluntness and sincerity -- and the undistracted momentum of its storytelling -- are like splashes of cold water in a face gone slack from a surfeit of irony and sophistication.

Eastwood supported McCain in the 2008 election, but "Gran Torino" depicts the passing of the baton of respect and trust from ancient WASP to youthful minority. Family values here are not exclusive to the traditional family; as in Eastwood's Best Picture of 2004, "Million Dollar Baby," "Gran Torino" suggests that a true "family" is not a mandate of blood but a construct of sympathy and support. Walt's literal family in "Gran Torino" is a caricature of awfulness -- city cousins to the money-hungry country kin who descended on the injured Hilary Swank in "Million Dollar Baby." The comforts of religion also are dubious; "Torino," like "Baby," finds the Eastwood character skeptically trading barbs with a baby-faced priest (played by Christopher Carley in the new film).

In "Million Dollar Baby," Eastwood acted as Swank's surrogate father; in "Gran Torino," he becomes an initially reluctant role model and father figure to a teenage boy living next door, Thao (Bee Vang), one of the many Hmong immigrants transforming Walt's neighborhood into a district for Southeast Asians.

Walt -- frequently placed near an American flag in Eastwood's shots -- initially thinks of his neighbors as "swamp rats," "gooks," "zipperheads" and even "barbarians." (As in "All in the Family," these ethnic slurs are played, sometimes uncomfortably, for laughs.) When he saves Thao from a Hmong gang, however, Walt becomes a community hero, a status he begrudgingly accepts -- along with the friendship of Thao's sassy sister, Sue (Ahney Her) -- once he gets a taste of Southeast Asian food and beer.

Although haunted by his war experience, Walt isn't afraid of violence; he keeps a pistol stuffed into his belt, and recklessly points his index finger as if it were a gun at some neighborhood thugs. As the gang pressure threatening Thao and Sue becomes more intense, it becomes clear that Walt is going to take action against the bad guys. Those expecting the cleansing bloodbath of "Unforgiven" -- another film in which Eastwood significantly placed himself against the stars-and-stripes -- might want to remember the horoscope Walt reads aloud early in the film: "Extraordinary events culminate in what might seem to be an anticlimax."

Walt Kowalski can be seen as the culmination of several decades of Eastwood characters; he's also kin to John Wayne's grouchy Rooster Cogburn (both men share the quality of "True Grit"). More meaningfully, he's a mellower Ethan Edwards, the racist war veteran played by Wayne in Ford's "The Searchers" (1956). Like Ethan, Walt chooses to eject himself from a society he no longer quite understands after he is forced to confront his prejudices; unlike Ethan, Walt isn't dismayed by his exile. His action represents his embrace of a new America.

-- John Beifuss: 529-2394

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