THE temptation to lavish praise on Clint Eastwood is tough to deny, even when he delivers so bungled a film — both as director and actor — as his latest, Gran Torino. No other contemporary filmmaker works as hard as Eastwood at understanding the American character, whether during war (Flags of Our Fathers) or wandering the lone prairie (Unforgiven, his finest film). We glimpse Eastwood through a special lens, one made all the more so because much of his late-career films have seemed calculated to repudiate his earlier, more gleefully violent ones. In that regard, his films are about America and American cinema and — bonus for critics and movie buffs — his role in both.
So it goes with Eastwood’s most recent creation, Walt Kowalski. Part Dirty Harry and part William Munny (the aged hitman Eastwood played in Unforgiven), Walt is in many respects a man without a country. The America this apparently racist, violent war vet fought the Chinese communists for in Korea no longer exists. The auto industry in which he toiled for so long is dying, along with Detroit, the city that once thrived as a result of it. Even more distressing for Walt is the fact that his once all-white, pristine neighborhood is rapidly ghettoizing amid an influx of poor Asians and blacks.
Not even his two adult sons (played by Brian Haley and Brian Howe) have absorbed Walt’s regard for old school values: his teenaged granddaughter shows up to the funeral of Walt’s wife at the beginning of the movie in a midriff. Walt literally growls at this offense (a character tick as annoying as Dustin Hoffman’s repetitions in Rain Man), as he does at all others that don’t require a firearm or a retro racial slur to handle. So, save for his dog and ’71 Gran Torino (which he buffs with a phallic regard), Walt is all alone — and he’s miserable as a result.
This is all potentially potent stuff, especially in light of the presidential election, which saw Republican die-hards confusing hate speech for political grievance. But Eastwood, working from a script by Nick Schenk, chickens out the moment the story switches gears from character study to buddy film. When Walt’s teenaged Asian neighbors (Bee Vang and Ahney Her) are attacked by gangbangers, Walt rescues them, not so much because they’re in danger, we’re to understand, but because the tussle has spilled out onto his property. Eastwood says through gritted teeth “Get off my lawn,” an order that initially resonates as cliché twisted into the pathetic last stand of an old white man. He’s the John McCain of the neighborhood.
Once Walt becomes pals with his two young neighbors, however, looking out for and eventually even identifying with them, we realized we’ve been had: All of Walt’s racist rants and general disgust with the state of the union as informed by his bigotry are revealed as lies. Eastwood’s careful construction of Walt’s belief system falls to pieces after the “change-inducing” encounter on the lawn. The proof: As Walt grows to love the teenagers he keeps calling them “slopes” and the like. The slurs were always terms of endearment, and we can no longer trust what Walt says.
Walt’s Gran Torino is meant to represent the old “Made in America” — the power and grandeur the country manufactured within its borders, not imported from its old communist enemy. But the fact that Eastwood has adjusted with the times, dissecting the violent transgressions of his earlier work, doesn’t mean that his character should — or can.
VIA:Las Vegas CityLife
Return To A&E Writing
See Other Vegas CityLife Stories