Gran Torino is defiantly over-the-top and unashamedly simple to a level where many other films boasting such attributes would be slain without mercy by today’s cynical and spectacle-hungry movie-going crowds. Yet when constructed by an old master on top of his trade such a film can be strangely and hauntingly affecting.

This is exactly the case here. At 78,  Clint Eastwood is totally unpretentious and confident that a well-told, meaningful story will reach the hearts of the audience even if the story violently refuses to bow to fashion. No other actor can so convincingly rough up an aspiring gangster 60 years his junior on screen. He does it here.

Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a retired autoworker from Detroit who is saddened and angered at the way the world is turning. His beloved wife has just died, his sons are overweight and complacent and can’t wait to ship him off to a retirement home and take his house, his grandchildren have grown up to be obnoxious machines of greed.

The last straw for him is that his neighbourhood is being taken over by Asian immigrants, maybe the children of the same people he fought back in Korea, an experience which scarred him for life. His own world has shrunken to the stamp-sized lawn in front of his house which he keeps in perfect shape and which he protects with a steel glare and a loaded rifle when gang violence spills onto it from the house next door.

Said house is occupied by a Hmong family whom he detests with the intensity of a lifetime’s prejudice. Thao (Bee Vang), the young boy next door is being bullied to join the local Asian gang; the young aspiring gangsters want him to prove himself by stealing Walt’s prized possession, a 1972 Gran Torino which he helped build on the Ford assembly line.

When Walt catches Thao red-handed he is convinced he is right to call all Asians "gooks" and "chinks", but soon someone comes along to chip away at his armour of bigotry and, to his horror, prove him wrong. Thao’s bright and sprightly sister Sue (Ahney Her) parries his insults with generous glee and opens his eyes to a world he refuses to see.

The Hmong, she tells him, are a people from Laos who fought on the American side in Vietnam, but had to flee their homeland when the US abandoned their campaign. Many came to America expecting a better life and some sort of gratitude, but found something else. "The girls go to college and the boys go to jail," she explains. To complicate things Thao is sent to work for Walt for shaming his family.

Walt accepts reluctantly, but gradually begins to like the boy and comes to two realisations: that he likes his neighbours better than his own family and that Thao’s and Sue’s future will never be secure as long as the gangs are around.

Yes, the movie is not exactly subtle and some may not buy the transformation of an old man whose world view should realistically be immovable, but perhaps without the same authority of Million Dollar Baby, Eastwood’s thematically similar masterpiece.

It’s rumoured that this may be Eastwood’s final acting role and, if so, this aged version of Dirty Harry would be a fitting bookend to a career unrivalled in power and simple elegance. Still, God forbid if this is the case.

Director
Clint Eastwood

Genre  
Crime, drama

Running time
116’