Vintage Clintwood

Rating: 8/10 (28 February 2009)

Here, Clint Eastwood directs himself in the role of Walt Kowalski, a 78 year old retired auto worker, who has just lost his wife. Emotionally distanced from his two sons who want him in a retirement home and even more so from his grandchildren, he drinks cheap beer and scowls from his porch as his declining Highland Park, Detroit, neighbourhood is taken over by migrants from Asia. After a bungled attempt by the Hmong kid next door, Thao, to steal Clint's precious 1973 Gran Torino Sports as part of a gang initiation, Walt gets to know the family, including Thao's bright young sister Sue. He is surprised to discover that the Hmong are an ethnic minority from Vietnam who supported the US during the war. He supervises Thao's unofficial community service, teaches him (with Harry the barber, a delightful minor character) to talk like an American working-class male, buys him tools and helps gets him a job. But this upsets the gang, and Walt finds himself in a nasty confrontation.
I am an admirer of Clint Eastwood's more recent work (the earlier action stuff is less alluring though Dirty Harry is a classic of its kind) and have enjoyed "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil", "Mystic River" and "Million Dollar Baby". Midnight was pretty shallow, but he entertains and stimulates the mind at the same time. I don't quite know how Eastwood the director manages to direct Clint the actor; perhaps there is another persona, Clintwood, who does it for him.
Walt, who shares his surname with a much younger curmudgeon, Stanley Kowalski (Brando's role in "Streetcar Named Desire"), sees his world fading away. Worse, he realizes his life has been wasted, raising hateful unpatriotic children and working in a plant producing, as Dan Neil of the LA Times put it "overfed, undersprung and largely unlamented muscle cars" such as his prized Gran Torino. He also has bad memories from his service in the Korean War. Walt is a grumpy old bigot but Eastwood, with that grim, granite face of his makes us understand. I couldn't help thinking though he would not have been the most congenial of husbands.
Early on in the story, the ridiculously young parish priest, after promising Walt's wife to do so on her deathbed, tries to get Walt to attend confession. He does, eventually, but it's interesting that Walt has not a lot to be guilty about. And, in the end, he redeems himself. It would be a very curmudgeonly person indeed who did not cheer, inwardly at least, at the final frames. The Gran Torino is up and running along Lakeshore Drive in the hands of a representative of the new America. Clint, I think, is cheering him along.