Eastwood's Masculinity: A National Resource

Rating: 10/10 (1 February 2009)

"Gran Torino" is a small, intimate, low-budget movie with no special effects. It is the best movie of 2008. "Gran Torino" exhibits courage and pertinence that other films only wish they could have. This movie is so true, and so subversive of PC BS, it's amazing that it got made, and that audiences are allowed to see it.
This is the first mainstream Hollywood movie in decades that treats a despised group of people  white, working class, Catholic ethnics, in this case, specifically, Poles  with any respect, affection, seriousness or dignity at all. There are a few movies where Italians or Greeks are allowed to be goofy, eccentric romantics ("Moonstruck," "My Big Fat, Greek Wedding") or glamorous Mafiosi, but a Hollywood movie that focuses, with respect, on a working class white ethnic man and his deteriorating neighborhood is hard to find.
"Gran Torino" actually celebrates working class, Polish values: working hard, every day, minding your own business, maintaining your house, being a decent neighbor, doing the right thing. Eastwood, in our current Politically Correct environment that denigrates traditional masculinity, has the courage to be a man. An unapologetic man. A real man.
The film has the courage to expose the festering tragedy taking place in working class neighborhoods across America. As manufacturing jobs have left, neighborhoods that Polish Americans like Walt Kowalski struggled, against all odds, to build, from their own blood, sweat, and tears, have been abandoned to rampant criminality, social degeneracy, and gang warfare. Since the witnesses of this vast slum-ification of America are working class people, elites don't care, and never address these issues, or address them with all the Politically Correct idiocy demonstrated by the one white liberal in this movie, who dresses and talks like a rapper, and responds with laughable inadequacy when he and his girlfriend are menaced on the street.
Clint Eastwood is magnificent. He models honorable masculinity, both for his fatherless next-door-neighbor, and for us in the audience. "This is how it's done, folks," he teaches. The wise will listen.
The movie further pokes Political Correctness in the eye by having Walt carelessly toss around ethnic slurs. I can't even type the words Walt uses into this review because this site actually is programmed to delete them. This is Big Brother, folks.
What Walt / Clint / "Gran Torino" is saying is clear: PC taboos are a joke. What matters is how you comport yourself when the rubber meets the road. At that moment, the white liberal in the movie is exposed for the complete phony he is, and Walt is revealed to be a deeply caring, responsible person whose values are the only values that can lead to a truly resurgent America that can handle its multicultural population in the best way for all. It doesn't matter what words you use or what jokes you tell at the bar. What matters is this: are you a decent person? Do you treat others with decency? That's what matters, folks, not PC taboos and games.