Clint's in the cradle

Rating: 7/10 (23 August 2009)

A film that gets better as it goes, which after you accept its unlikely premise and engage with the characters and their situations, takes you to an unexpected and yet satisfying, if still downbeat, conclusion. Eastwood shows us, again, that there are stories out there for older actors, even if the main beneficiary here is himself.
The movie strikes me as remarkably old-fashioned - in true Warner Brothers style, one could easily imagine a Spencer Tracy or Jimmy Cagney playing the mentor part here that Eastwood takes, whilst appreciating the action's updating into "boys 'n the hood" territory. So we get the recently bereaved, mean and ornery widower Eastwood, the last American in a neighbourhood pretty much made over into Chinatown with the influx of Far Eastern immigrants and the contrasting stories of his lack of communication with his own distant, certainly selfish and inconsiderate family of sons and their wives who want him out of their way ensconced in a retirement home whilst anticipating being beneficiaries after his death, with the nascent relationships he builds up with the young children of the new Chinese family who move in next door.
To be fair, I didn't believe for a moment that crusty old Clint, the Stars and Stripes fluttering proudly over his porch, would ever hook up and bond with the new arrivals as he does, but you have to give the story licence to unfold. This also takes in a sub-plot of Eastwood's relationship with a keen young priest who follows a promise to the former's late wife to look after the old coot and hopefully bring him to a sort of redemption.
This stuff takes up most of the first two thirds of the movie and is as unbelievable as it's occasionally over-sentimental. However when the teenage gang turn to rape and violence on his by-now young protégé Thao, his sister and the rest of their family, after Eastwood's well-meant but ill-judged intervention, the film takes a darker turn as Eastwood, who we see throughout coughing up blood, hinting at his own impending demise, resolves the problem in an unusual and surprising way, choosing passivity over violence to get the job done.
The conclusion plays with our pre-conceived notions of Eastwood's tough-guy persona from his Leone and Dirty Harry pictures - indeed I thought the screenplay had written itself into a corner, but as I said above, resolves this satisfyingly, redolent of Cagney's classic "Angels with Dirty faces" all those years earlier - that film had a priest in a prominent part too.
The acting is fine by all, although Clint's rasp really can be hard to make out at times. His cinematography, as usual is very good, the contemporary neighbourhood and its environs, convincingly depicted, less so the characters, I have to say.
His main strength, however, remains his story-telling nous - there's never any flashy directing tricks, just point the camera at the characters, give them stuff to say and a story to inhabit and print it. Works fine for me.