Unforgiven redux

Rating: 10/10 (12 January 2009)

The war comes home to roost for one man, a Korean War veteran, the man does what comes naturally to him when there's a conflict, in spite of his advanced age, he still maintains a soldier mentality and runs toward danger. Walt Kowalski(Clint Eastwood) is an evergreen soldier; the olive hue of his camouflage fatigues bled into his skin. Faced with an encounter among two Hmong clans, the third party picks a side, the lesser of two evils, just as he did in Korea, and performs his duty with emotional detachment. The Hmong gang-banger who harasses his cousin is analogous to the rogue soldier and the helpless citizen that pit Korea against Korea, a civil war of sorts, just like the one reprising itself in this Michigan ghetto. Although Walt remedies the crisis by defending the defenseless, it's strictly business with him; it's his job. After the gang-affiliated boys drive off, Walt tells his grateful neighbors to get off his lawn; they're no different from the gang-bangers, whom he issued the same directive, in the same admonishing tones. This objectivity is no mere act of humbleness; he wants this Hmong family on the other side of his property, or better yet, on the other side of the ocean.
Prior to accepting Sue's invitation for a barbecue at her family's house, this charming Hmong girl and her shy younger brother Thao(Bee Vang), as a result of happenstance after happenstance, unknowingly helped the xenophobe evolve into a politically incorrect curmudgeon, by possessing the personal qualities sadly lacking in his grandchildren. Still, old habits die hard, so the occasional racist slip manages itself into their otherwise affable dialogues, which belies a lingering overtone of white superiority. The turning point of Walt Kowalski's re-education eventuates itself in the Hmong family's basement, site of the aforementioned barbecue, where the once unneighborly neighbor recognizes the glancing looks a pretty girl shoots Thao's way. Isolated from the other party revelers, Walt approaches the young man, this time, in a mentoring capacity, to tell him that he's a "p****", an all-encompassing derogatory moniker which differs from the racial-specific digs that are intrinsic to Walt's lexicon. The old man has turned a corner. In an ensuing scene, at the barbershop, when Walt's barber calls Thao a "c****", the audience(depending on the audience) understands that this polarizing word lost its original dynamism as a term of demeanment, the minute that Walt truly befriended his Hmong charge. Being called a "c****" now, signifies that Thao is no longer the "other". Walt's approval has the effect of assimilating the Hmong boy; he's just one of the guys. Thao is the "c****", the barber is the "d***", and the grizzled, old widower is the "p******".
As "Unforgiven" commented on the morality of violence in this actor/filmmaker's body of work that pertains to the Western genre, "Gran Turino" is a remonstration of the vigilantism component inherent in Don Siegel's "Dirty Harry", and its ensuing sequels("Magnum Force", "The Enforcer", "Sudden Impact", and "The Dead Pool"). The seminal 1971 film that introduced Detective Harry Callahan to the world, began with the reprobate law official taunting, then gunning down, a black man in cold blood. In "Gran Turino", as Sue(Ahney Her) is being accosted by a group of dark-skinned locals, "Dirty Harry" reverberations can be felt in Walt's symbolic pulling of the trigger at the black youths. He gives them the finger. He gives the Hmong gang the finger, too. The anti-violence message of "Unforgiven" might have gotten lost during the film's climactic bloodbath, but this time, the message is made manifest through its reinterpretation of that final sequence where the anti-hero gunslinger confronts his personal demons.