The American soul can be regenerated, redeemed

Rating: 10/10 (22 March 2009)

Clint Eastwood confronts, with the power of an old man who has not lost his memory of the crimes of the Korean War generation, what those crime have transformed him into: a racist, self-centered, extremely bitter person who has become a recluse in his self-righteous expiation of his past, and this expiation takes the color of the total rejection of anything that is not white and wrapped up in an American flag, not seeing that this turns the flag into a shroud, the shroud of all the basic principles of these United States of America. But Clint Eastwood is a man of epiphanies. So he works an epiphany out of this horror. His neighbors are from a Laotian tribe that fought with the Americans in Vietnam against the Communists. Circumstances bring the young boy of this family to trying to steal, on the order from a gang of young people of this community, the Gran Torino collectible car of our Kowalski. Of course he is interrupted and yet spared a bullet that would have killed him. Why? Because Kowalski had done that, had killed a young boy, one day in Korea and that crime is still haunting him. Circumstances will lead him to helping that boy and his sister out of difficult situations with that gang but also with some blacks. He does that on the spur of the moment and along the line of his long cultivated guilt that has to find a salvation after the death of his wife and the discovery that he is spitting blood and probably has lung cancer since he is a heavy smoker. The gang though does not take an intimidation for an answer and certainly not for a final and uncrossable warning. So they go further in their victimizing that boy and girl from next door, a lot farther, and Kowalski take the case in his own hands, at night when he is sure the whole nest of killing predators will be assembled and he comes out of the night, on their front lawn, with dozens of witnesses all around to provoke them into killing him, in fact over-killing him and thus freeing him from his guilt and his disease and at the same time bringing the whole gang down for quite a long time. The best part of this film is the giving away of his possession before and after his death. He dares give his silver star to the young Hmong boy Tao before dying, and will his home to the church of the young Irish priest that had forced him into a sacrificial and Christian attitude and his Gran Torino to Tao again. Clint Eastwood in his old age seems to be cleaning up his own house and home, I mean his American mind and soul and that great Spring clearance takes the form of an admirable and at times compassionate or pathetic sidewalk confession and garage expiation. And that is so reassuring about the transformation that is taking place in the USA right now under our eyes, watered that it has been and still is by the blood of millions more victims, US or not, of two more wars in two more foreign countries that had asked nothing.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID