Grumpy Old Man

Rating: 6/10 (6 December 2009)

It wouldn't be fair to say that Clint Eastwood was coasting through this movie. Nobody who directs and stars in a large-scale production while he's easing towards ninety is able to coast very far. Yet there is a relaxed and sometimes careless quality to this movie about a grouchy, lonely curmudgeon who slouches around mumbling to himself, smoking and drinking beer, cursing his neighbors, rebuking himself for something that happened more than fifty years ago, before his climactic expiation.
One of those next-door neighbors is a Hmong kid named Thao. The Hmong are an internally marginal group who live in the mountains of Southeast Asia. A major effort was made by the US to enlist them on our side during the Vietnam War. A large family of Hmong live in that modest Midwestern house. Thao's initiation into his Asian gang involves stealing Clint's prized and exquisitely preserved Gran Torino. The plot is foiled and Clint gradually finds himself swept up into the dynamics of Hmong home life and Thao's integration into the gang.
At this point in his life, Clint is pretty old and he claims this will be the last film he acts in. Well, the withdrawal is sensible enough. There aren't many roles for men who are so late in life. The ones that are available tend to form a genre of their own. The narrative structure seems to follow a line like that of "Gran Torino." Grumbling old man is bitter and set in his ways, sometimes comically rigid. A new challenge enters his life and he rediscovers his humanity. Paul Newman went through it; Jack Lemon and Walter Matthau; Henry Fonda.
As an example of the genus, this one isn't notable in any way. Except that Clint's profane, mumbling monologues are often pretty funny. And there's an amusing scene in which Clint and his barber try to teach Thao to speak the way real men speak -- nothing but curses and racist insults. As a director he keeps his performers hitting their marks.
The performers themselves aren't always up to professional standards. His Italian barber, John Carroll Lynch, sounds like an actor. The boy and girl from the Hmong family don't quite clear that bar, although their monolingual elders come across as authentic enough.
It's one of Clint Eastwood's lesser efforts but I give him credit for having done it at all. Even at its worst, it's not as insulting to the viewer as some of the meretricious trash affecting our screens these days.