“Get off my lawn” is the new “make my day.” Well, not really, but The Clint thinks it is. In his latest offering, “Gran Torino,” Eastwood tries to make a throwback to old days of cinema while commenting on how things have changed in America over his remarkably long career. The final result is a lukewarm film that sacrifices subtlety, insight and often plot for fear the audience won’t get the point—no matter how often and how heavy-handedly the near-octogenarian reminds us.

“Gran Torino” explores the relationship between Walt Kowalski (Eastwood) and the changing world around him. His wife has just died, and Walt realizes that he has no real connection with his family. Whether he regrets it or not, it is too late for redemption.
Walt is a Korean War vet who likes to remind the world how much it owes him and how much more about life and death he knows than it does, even Friar Janovich, with whom he spars for most of the film.

Walt hates everyone: the priest, his family and his neighborhood, which becomes increasingly more Asian. Only his dog is spared the shocking and sometimes oddly-funny insults and racial slurs he fires at everyone else. Walt says whatever he wants to whomever he wants because he thinks its okay.

After a neighborhood gang attacks his neighbors, Walt “saves” them by chasing the gang off his lawn. Gradually through the rest of the film, Walt decides he has more in common with his Hmong neighbors than with his own family and teaches the boy, Thao, things that a father might teach a son.

Though Walt’s softer side comes out when caring for his adopted family, he never lightens up on the hateful racial language. This doesn’t at all seem to repulse those he constantly insults. I couldn’t figure out why his neighbors still cared to be around him. I would have left the old man to sit by himself, drinking beer on his porch.

That is one of the many problems I had with Nick Schenk’s screenplay. The film starts at a nicely deliberate pace but rushes to a frantic, fabricated and heavy-handed ending. Schenk wants redemption for Walt, but I’m not sure that Walt really wants it. Is he self-giving or selfish? We can see his redemption coming a mile away, but I’m not sure it’s satisfying, or in time, for that matter.

I was also very disappointed with Eastwood. All of his films promise a certain level of quality by carrying his name, and technically, this film almost holds up. Eastwood shows he still can direct, but I’m not sure exactly what he meant with this film. The Clint’s best films (“Mystic River” and “Letters from Iwo Jima”) are involved with the characters but hold them at enough of a distance to observe and not get too emotionally caught up. In “Gran Torino,” as in “Million Dollar Baby,” Clint pours on sappy sentimentality.

I also had a problem with Clint’s take on the character of Walt. Casting himself was interesting. Walt is stuck in the days that embody his notion of “great America,” and he holds on to that in changing times. He sticks to his principles and takes action because he feels he must. In a lot of ways, Walt is Dirty Harry revisited. In other ways, “Gran Torino” is Eastwood’s love letter to “The Searchers” and John Wayne. He longs for the old romantic notion of America.

Walt stays in his neighborhood as the Hmong people slowly replace his old white friends. Sitting in his garage, Walt’s Ford-manufactured Gran Torino is a treasure from the past, there to admire and occasionally polish. To go with this throwback mentality comes the film’s greatest flaw. Though it never supports Walt’s racial slurs, the film is itself incredibly racist. Walt must save his Asian neighbors from everything including a bad sink, insufficient fathering and a gang on which no one will call the police. In this way, the film plays as Eastwood’s thesis on why “The Great White Saviour” is a valid notion.

This disturbed me more than Eastwood singing the first verse of the song he wrote with Jamie Cullum, just for the film.

“Gran Torino” is not a terrible film. Clint knows how to direct an interesting and somewhat entertaining film, and his performance is solid, though not anywhere nearly as good as some want to think. It’s layered in its look at America in a time of change, but the answers it offers are not satisfactory. With the inauguration of Barack Obama in days, this film shows fear from Walt, Eastwood and people who share some of their ideas of America. If that’s so, then indeed, like John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards from “The Searchers,” these old-school ideas of Clint’s will be shut outside the cabin. For as the neo-western suggests, this is no country for old men.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 5:59 pm and is filed under Cadenza, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through this feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.