Clint Eastwood: herald of multiculturalism?

Rating: 10/10 (21 January 2009)

Clint Eastwood returns to the screen with his second film of 2008 as a director (and his first acting role since "Million Dollar Baby" in 2004), following the Angelina Jolie vehicle "Changeling", and the result is one of the more interesting features in his filmography. Though the role of Walt Kowalski was apparently not written with Eastwood specifically in mind, it is almost impossible to think otherwise, as so much in the film depends upon the screen persona that Eastwood has painstakingly constructed in the minds of audiences over his several decades of screen stardom (drawing, in particular, upon the four films he did as Detective "Dirty" Harry Callahan, the iconic vigilante cop). The marketing suggests that this is just another such vigilante story, pitting the now 78-year-old Eastwood against another gang of ethnic toughs for the safety of his neighbours (which probably set stereotype alarms off in many a viewer). However, what the trailer suggests is not much like what the film delivers.
Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) is a just-widowed retired Ford employee and Korean War veteran living in Highland Park, Michigan. The film opens with his wife's funeral, where he scowls at just about everyone: his two sons, their wives, and their children, especially the eldest granddaughter; and he insults the earnest but inexperienced young priest (Christopher Carney) who, at Walt's dead wife's urging, has committed himself to making Walt go to confession, which the old man has no intention of doing. Walt is just about the last white person living in his old neighbourhood, otherwise populated now by Hmong immigrants. Walt is racist almost to the point of caricature (the film takes refuge in audacity; he's so virulent in his insults that it becomes a genuinely uproarious point of humour with the audience), but he's generally misanthropic, and would rather just be left alone with his dog, Daisy, and his beloved car, the titular 1972 Gran Torino. It is the car, however, that leads to him being dragged into the lives of his neighbours, the Lor family. Thao (Bee Vang) is a fatherless young man without direction in life, who, over the objections of his sister Sue (Ahney Her), finds himself drawn towards his cousin's gang. The price of initiation is the theft of Walt's Gran Torino, which he fails at; the gang attempts to drag him away, but Walt, not knowing Thao was his attempted carjacker, intervenes ("Get off my lawn."), and inadvertently becomes a hero to the neighbourhood, to his annoyance.
Resocializing Walt becomes the project of Sue, the independent-minded and Americanized daughter, who is heedless of Walt's constant insults (firing some of her own back at him, which seems to earn her his respect). In particular, Sue hopes that her brother can find a male role model and some idea of what he wants to do in life. Meanwhile, the gang lurks on the periphery.
This sounds like an extremely cliché and sentimental story of a white guy learning a Valuable Lesson about race, mixed with a standard Clint Eastwood vigilante drama about taking the fight to the local punks, but it is neither. On the former score, Eastwood's style of storytelling (and his presence in the story itself) is relentless in avoiding sentimentality; there is a strongly realistic feeling to the proceedings. There is, however, an unexpectedly high quotient of humour; the middle section of the film is frequently hilarious, making a strong case for Eastwood as the ultimate straight man in a buddy comedy (though he is also the source of most of the humour, a mix of "fish out of water" and audacious "I can't believe they went there" use of racial slurs). On the second count, the story Eastwood is telling here is actually a thorough deconstruction of the "Dirty Harry" persona that he has cultivated over the years, similar to his "Unforgiven" as a take on his old Western roles. Much of Walt's mentoring of Thao concerns views of masculinity, and the ultimate result is something audiences probably won't expect. This story wasn't expressly written with Eastwood in mind, but it's hard to imagine anyone else essaying the part, which ends up drawing so much from audience recognition of Eastwood's own history. One would never have imagined Clint Eastwood as a herald of a new, multicultural America, but that is the image this film presents us with, as the Hmong are the new defenders of traditional American family values, while Walt's family are incredibly shallow (a minor knock against the film, I think; they're so cartoonishly unworthy as to not be very believable), and there's an hysterical attack on the only other young white character as a weak imitator of blacks (or, more specifically, urban gangster/thug culture) (which the blacks don't take kindly to either; African-Americans and Latinos are tangential here, with gangs of each appearing briefly, but the focus is mainly on whites and Asians).
On the acting front, Eastwood turns in another award-worthy performance; whether or not he gets an Oscar nomination, I would count him deserving of one. Eastwood also, per another recent trend, helps score the film, and actually warbles a few bars of the theme song, "Gran Torino", which must be heard to be believed. The primary debate among reviewers of this film seems to be about whether the first-time Hmong actors that Eastwood has cast are great, awful, or something in between. Of the two main Hmong actors, Ahney Her as Sue I found to be extremely compelling; Sue is, after Walt, the film's best-realized character, and one minor issue I had with the film is how she sort of fades from view as the focus shifts to Thao. Vang as Thao is less polished than Sue, and some scenes stretch the limits of his range, but it is a credible debut.
All in all, this is one of the year's best films, and I would highly recommend it.