GRAN TORINO
WARNER BROS.
RELEASED 20 February 2009
When intially announced, it was rumoured that this was in fact a new secret Dirty Harry movie. It’s not, but Clint Eastwood’s grizzled Korean War vet called Walt Kowalski bears strong similarities. Walt believes in old-fashioned values, and has more than one gun handy should he need to protect his property. After losing his wife, Walt rebuffs advice and offers of help from family and the catholic church. He’s happy to sit on his porch growling at the world going by, beer cans piling up beside him. The thing with Walt is, he’s racist. Black, Asian, Jew or Italian, Walt doesn’t give a shit. He insults everyone, and equal opportunities racist if you like. The area of Detroit he lives in has become predominantly Asian, and his next door neighbours are Hmong, a Chinese culture that fought alongside the US in the Vietnam war and came to the US afterwards as refugees. When he saves young lad Thao (Bee Vang) from a local gang, the family deluge Walt with gifts and insist Walt use Thao (who he calls Toad as he can’t be bothered to pronounce the name correctly) as his help for whatever odd-jobs he may want carrying out for a week. Thao’s sister Sue (Ahney Her) is keen on getting to know Walt and becomes his translator and information guide to all things ‘Hmong’. But the local gang are still a problem, and Walt feels it’s his civic duty to sort them out.
The best thing about ‘Gran Torino’ is Clint Eastwood. This is his first performance since the Oscar-winning ‘Million Dollar Baby, and what a star he is. The screen literally crackles whenever he’s on it, and I could watch him act all day long, as I’m sure most of us could. He growls, he spits, he barks, he gets his gun out at any opportunity (he evens threatens people with his fingers ‘cocked’ like a gun), he insults the catholic church, and he wisecracks about his own greedy family. It’s a barnstorming performance.
Unfortunately, that’s where my love for ‘Gran Torino’ ends. The acting was my first problem with the film. Clint gives a great, growling, almost self-parodying performance that will remind many of his more comical seventies pictures. But as infectious as Eastwood's performance is, the rest of the cast fail. The priest doesn’t convince (which I think is mainly down to the poor writing of his character), and the two Hmong kids are too self-conscious. Both are debut movie stars, and it shows, their delivery being often awkward and their mannerisms stiff. Even Walt's sons and their families don't feel like real people, divvying up who’s going to have what while he’s still breathing.
Much of this brings me to my second problem with the film. The story starts off by laying out in big letters where we are and who we're dealing with. It then serves up a disjointed tale of a man at the end of his life seeking redemption for horrific wartime events he has carried round inside him for most of his life. But the story veers from vigilante B-movie to un-PC comedy and to redemptive feel-good movie with no apparent purpose. There seem to be too many genres packed in and the movie feels disconnected as a whole. Chronology is all over the place too. It seems like weeks go by at points when the next thing you know, it actually only seems to have been a day.
Third problem. Stupid character moments. Walt coughs up blood which Sue worries about, but ten seconds later she is giving him hard liquor. Does that not strike you as slightly odd? The priest questions his faith at the first sign of trouble and seemingly takes Walt's counsel, which again I just found a bizarrely-scripted scene. Eastwood's character goes through many vigilante escapades that quite frankly would not end the way they do, with the most concerning one being a scene where he talks down three black teens on a deserted street corner. I'm pretty sure Walt would have got a slap round the back of the head at the very least, to be honest.
The fourth problem, and my biggest concern with the whole movie, was the blatant racism running throughout. Now the lead character is racist, but he's portrayed in a 'silly old man' manner that seems to want to excuse his behaviour. And because it's Clint, you laugh at the absurdity of the things he comes out with, but I felt really uncomfortable watching this movie because I felt it demeaned racism and made it alright to laugh it off because the lead character is too old to know better, which simply isn't acceptable. When the Spanish national football manager made racist remarks about Thierry Henry, his opinion was that he was only joking, and I had the horrible feeling that 'Gran Torino' was doing the same sort of thing. Racism isn’t a joke. It seemed to be saying, 'Yes, we know these words are racist, but Clint Eastwood's character isn't really hurting anyone by saying these things, is he?' Ninety-nine percent of the laughs in 'Gran Torino', and there are a lot of them, seem to revolve around Walt Kowalski's laughably OTT racism. Although Walt comes to befriend the Hmong community, he still uses racist language and doesn’t pronounce their names correctly, and he jokes about eating dog at a barbeque (another tired racist stereotype), and yet the Hmong laugh along at his indiscretions, seemingly honoured that ‘whitey’ has deemed them worthy.
‘Gran Torino’ features possibly the final career performance of Clint Eastwood (he has said this himself), and while I absolutely love how he snarls throughout the whole film like an old Dirty Harry, I really don’t like the film, because I think the end result is terribly confused and promotes the wrong message.
TWO OUT OF FIVE