Eastwood's Legacy

Rating: 8/10 (7 March 2009)

At this point in his career, Clint Eastwood can afford to get a little experimentalhe's earned it. I mean, would you tell this mean-looking SOB otherwise? I thought not. And while "Gran Torino" treads territory that invites memories of such whitebread vigilante epics like "Joe" and "Falling Down," Eastwood (who directed and stars) transforms his film into a character study that, in spite of all its by-the-numbers machinations, works on damn near every level. I have never been a big fan of the man's directorial outings, but the appropriateness of his slice-of-life detail really turned my head here. Our grizzled, aged, yet firm-featured star plays Walt Kowalski, a Korean War veteran whose cynical, bigoted outlook on the world is affirmed by his wife's passing, and outright exacerbated by the arrival of a Hmong family next door. When the young son is caught trying to steal the codger's 1972 Gran Torino as part of a gang initiation, Walt becomes a one-man force of nature who isn't beyond training a gun on the kids stepping on his fresh-cut lawn. Yet when he frightens off the bullying gang in a gesture of unintended heroism, he is heralded by his neighbors, eventually acquiescing to the pleas that Thao, the son, pay off his transgression with a week of servitude to Walt. That these two unlikely characters become friends goes without saying; it's in the generational and cultural gaps that Eastwood makes these conventions something of revelation: the film even presents a nagging spiritual quandary for Walt that intensifies his burden as we see the layers of ice thawing from his personality. Additionally, "Gran Torino" is filled with such spun-from-Americana Archie Bunkerisms that one can't help but laugh at the audacity of Kowalski's passive racism (even positing that his usage of such slurs might spring from his own insecurity and fear); it sounds "wrong" and "un-PC" to say such a thing, and perhaps it's only in the context of our familiarity with Eastwood the actor and his hoarse voice and deliberate mannerisms that humor connects in such surprising places. Eastwood is no longer the young man who set screens ablaze in the Westerns of Sergio Leone, or as Harry Callahan, and "Gran Torino" seamlessly consolidates decades of his tough-guy persona into a character who is at once Eastwood, and also a near-satirical comment on the character he has been most associated with for his entire career, providing a fitting tribute to his own career, and an appreciative gift to fans of great cinema.