Effective & timely if limited Eastwood drama

Rating: 7/10 (6 February 2009)

Involving yet somewhat slender drama by Clint Eastwood, portraying an elderly Polish-American widower/Korean War vet/auto-industry retiree maintaining what's left of his decaying metropolitan household against the increasing incursions of gangland warfare and immigrant blight. As profanely verbose and insulated as he is leathery and gun-waving, Eastwood's Walt Kowalski has also managed to drive off what's left of his children and religious standing with his baby-faced priest (Christopher Carley), expending his remaining pungent life energies on his constant house/auto upkeep and warning off his Asian neighbors as trespassers. Yet when Walt's deepest bigoted fears occurs as one of the young neighbors is forced to participate in a gang initiation by breaking into Walt's backyard for thievery the event instead triggers shaky and harsh recriminations and explanations between Walt and the boy's family that soon become merely grudging and even welcoming, freeing the multi-generational Hmong family through their well-spoken daughter and interpreter Sue Lor (Ahney Her) to offer her brother as a laborer on any projects Walt needs to make up for the bad introduction. Through time and a lot of cooked food gifts and party invitations from his previously ignored and circumspect neighbors Walt begins viewing them as actual people with their own history of unfair treatment and cherished intra-cultural sustainments. Yet as Walt bears with a suspected terminal disease and trying to introduce the young man to a stronger view of himself through career and dating coaching, some of the local gangs become increasingly aggressive and offended by the increasing warmth and unity Walt's relenting have inspired, and when the group dealing with Sue Lor's brother make him a 'deal-with-us-or-pay" offer Walt's smoldering and deadly protective instincts rebound against the gang into a shocking and potentially deadly confrontation. Reasurringly reflective and gently humored in its first 2/3rds Eastwood is generous and composed here, organizing Nick Schenck's script (from Schenk's outline with Dave Johansson) with its threadbare lower-middle class American flavor and hearty exchanges against the generationally-stacked, commemorative ideals of the Hmong enclave. The sequences are engaging and compelling throughout. Yet I found Kowalski himself ultimately harmless as a protagonist, not because he lacks adequate narrative drive (I've never seen a more powerful shot of Eastwood than when he points a gun right into the camera here) but his actual reach as a bigot is written off only with a line about "I killed 13 men.", displaying nothing about if or when he willingly also 'killed' the efforts or opportunities of others unlike him to succeed and prosper alongside him at his jobs or within his community (while watching I could envision someone more along the lines of George C. Scott or Jack Nicholson equally understanding Kowalski but taking him into a more strategically-comical or unpredictable patterning). The film's visual technique, commencing with white-hot exteriors and comforted yet undimensionally-lit and spatial interiors soon becoming warmer yet hard-angled and shadowy, provides a highly immediate contrasting balance and suspense buildup of grit and sacrificial exchange that is belied by the earnest yet overly-coercive writing. GRAN TORINO therefore gives Eastwood--if not quite up to the achievements of UNFORGIVEN or MILLION DOLLAR BABY--and his surrounding cast of newcomers and reliable character actors a hard-hitting, eye-level contemporary canvas to explore what has been going on in America's post-Vietnam/post-Industrial era.