Redeeming qualities

Rating: 8/10 (18 January 2009)

I can say that I appreciate Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby, but I never really liked them personally for whatever reason. Clint Eastwood is a very dedicated and skillful director, and it's nice this time around to see a movie that he both did really well and that I also really enjoyed watching. Those seeing the commercial of his newest release might be inclined to avoid it because of how violent and racist it is, but I appeal here and now that everyone give this one a chance--most of the "bad parts", so to speak, are in the commercial, and the rest is pure character-driven magnificence.
Eastwood plays Walt, the ostensibly racist Korean war vet that everyone's so quick to compare to grizzled bad cop Dirty Harry, but is actually a whole new anti-hero: gruff, curmudgeon-y, and generally willing to spit in the face of everyone who approaches him, he's just lost his wife and has settled to a life of fending off shallow and selfish relatives while his neighbors' kid attempts to steal his vintage Gran Torino in a gang initiation. From there it's a pretty quick gravitational attraction between him and Hmong family next door, and despite his distrust and general hateful attitude to everyone around him, they warm his heart and low and behold, he finds himself saying things like, "I have more in common with these gooks than my own family." Striking a friendship, he still finds that the family just cannot escape from the gang-activity crawling pestilently around the neighborhood, so he takes the kid under his wing and does what he can to protect the family.
I went in expecting one movie and ended up with a much better one. Like some others, I was expecting something more like a Dirty Harry meets Million Dollar Baby, and even throughout the movie it kept feeling like it could rapidly devolve into a vengeance narrative like Taxi Driver; instead, there's a lot of humanistic humor, good-will, and caring behind Eastwood's permi-scowl, and eventually the narrative is more like a mature deconstruction of those very expectations the audience has. Eastwood seems to be revisiting the architypes of his past and redefining them, partially because he no longer seems interested in violence as a justification for entertainment but as a real-world problem to deal with. Still, in this one he seems to be delighting in keeping people on their toes, and there are many things you'll leave with both expected and unexpected.
As much as this movie wasn't as "hard" as I expected it, it did have a very real and very devastating awareness of just how violent and deadly these things can be. Tension runs high through a lot of it because it's really hard to see such fleshed-out characters get hurt. It's interesting that a lot of movies that have come out recently, like Synecdoche New York, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and The Wrestler, have been deeply invested in seeing people at the ends of their lives searching desperately for a re-evaluation of their value. Eastwood's particular concern in many of his later movies is redemption. Gran Torino fits right in with recent menu, while also being its own wonderful serving.