Tell Me Punk -- Are You Feeling Lucky?

Rating: 9/10 (13 January 2009)

In the last few years, Clint Eastwood has enjoyed a career renaissance like no other, but I've become increasingly resistant to his films. Movies like "Mystic River" and "Million Dollar Baby" felt like masterpieces while I was watching them, but after I'd had time to digest them and think about them, they began to unravel. As for "Letters from Iwo Jima," I found it accomplished but cold and formal, like Eastwood was trying too hard to make a Great American Movie.
For those reasons, I went into "Gran Torino" with modest expectations. Whether or not time will be kind to it I don't know, but as of now this stands as the best of Eastwood's recent string.
Eastwood himself plays a relic from the past, Walt Kowalski, a lonely and gruff widower living in Detroit, hateful toward anyone who's not white and not much better to those who are. He reluctantly becomes involved in the lives of an Asian-American family next door when a neighborhood gang terrorizes them, and we see gradually see the ice of Walt's reserve melt as he realizes that cultural divides aren't so hard to hurdle after all. Trailers bill the film as a Dirty Harry/vigilante-type story, and people may come to the film in anticipation of seeing Eastwood kick ass. He does do some ass kicking, but the film has much more than vigilantism on its mind, and a surprisingly sweet and warm narrative emerges as Eastwood decides it's up to him to teach the boy next door how to be a man.
The film is not without its missteps, notably in Eastwood's depiction of Walt's awful family, caricatures of yuppy affluence and privilege (he made similar stumbles in depicting Hilary Swank's trailer-trash family in "Million Dollar Baby"). And the screenplay gets off to a horribly clunky start, especially in some early scenes between Walt and the neighborhood priest. But by the time the story had sucked me in, these flaws became increasingly easier to overlook.
"Gran Torino" doesn't feel like it's trying to achieve greatness, and maybe for that very reason, it does.
Grade: A