Curmudgeon with a Golden Heart

Rating: 7/10 (26 December 2008)

In my town "Gran Torino" opened on Christmas Day. That was fitting for a movie whose main theme centers, way too obviously, on Christian redemption. Clint Eastwood plays a 70-something retired auto worker and Korean War veteran named Walt Kowalski who growls at much of the world. Literally. Kowalski loved his wife, but she has just died. He is contemptuous of the fresh-faced local priest who tries to minister to him and distant from his two sons and their families, and he derides his new Hmong neighbors -- Kowalski is said to be one of the last white residents of a changing working class Detroit neighborhood -- with racial epithets. Now living alone with his dog Daisey and several cases of Pabst beer, he defends his property, whose lawn he is shown repeatedly mowing, with his loaded Army rifle. "Get off my lawn!" may be this film's "Go ahead. Make my day!"
In the Kowalski garage sits a mint-condition 1972 automobile -- the Gran Torino of the title -- which seems to symbolize Kowalski's self-centeredness and devotion to another time. Early in the film a Hmong gang conscripts a neighbor's son in the effort to hijack the car. The boy is caught and, in accordance with Hmong tradition, does penance for his sin by volunteering his labor to Kowalski for a week. The Eastwood character puts the boy to work repairing properties in the neighborhood. Kowalski later inadvertently rescues the boy from the gang, as a result of which he is brought not entirely willingly into the lives of his neighbors.
To this point the Eastwood character has been almost too nasty to be either credible or likable, but now he softens big time. A health problem surfaces, and that builds some sympathy. The script takes on comedic touches, and it appears that Kowalski is simply a curmudgeonly guy with a heart of gold. Just when you think this is an Archie Bunker kind of film, however, it shifts again, and a gang war takes front and center. Kowalski involves himself in it with the spirit of a man who knows how to get things done, gets it done badly, and eventually redeems himself. There is a gunfight. We learn the secret of his troubled soul, and the racial epithets and other hatred turn out to be a projection of his self-hatred.
As this comment may suggest, the problem of this film for me is its lack of focus. Pathos, action, psychodrama, comedy, Disney-like social commentary -- they're all in the script -- but in a mixture that is, until the end, trite and off-putting. Eastwood shows little range. The Hmong neighbors are all too cute and lovable. Kowalski changes the habits of a lifetime in one scene for reasons that are obscure at best.
This film may win an Oscar or two, but it's no "Citizen Kane."