Angriest old man

Rating: 7/10 (24 January 2009)

In his latest Oscarrific film, Clint Eastwood plays a cranky Korean War vet who seemingly hates everyone, including his dopey grown sons and his new neighbors, an Asian family. Walt Kowalski, having recently buried his wife, now lives alone in an immaculate house with his yellow Lab, alone to carry the sins of his past and to meticulously tend to his two loves, his yard and his mint-condition 1972 Ford Gran Torino.
Eastwood takes great care in showing us how irascible Walt is. He constantly spits tobacco juice. He shuns the church and its eager-beaver pastor. He wants merely to be left alone, albeit with a half-grimace, half-sneer on his face at all times, as if he's just eaten something disagreeable. Yes, hardly a more cuddly, welcoming figure you'll never see.
Shortly after the Lor family moves in next door, raising Walt's hackles, trouble begins; an Asian gang harasses the only man in the family, teenaged Thao, and his older sister, Su, trying to recruit the former. As an initiation rite, the gang forces Thao to steal Walt's prized car, but he fails in the process, thus angering both the gang and Walt, who catches him. But later, when the gang tries to grab Thao forcibly in front of his home, Walt chases them off with a shotgun, earning the gratitude of the neighborhood and the undying wrath of the gang. (This is the scene in the trailer where Eastwood famously tells the gangbangers to get off his lawn.) Such a display of rebellion would never sit well for a die-hard gang member, so certainly the situation escalates. I won't ruin the plot for you any further than to tell you that things do get out of hand. Armed with big guns, little guns, and a perpetual sneer, Kowalski isn't a mere carbon copy of Charles Bronson in Death Wish; he realizes his limitations (not to mention his mortality), that he's not some kind of hero in any sense - even though the rest of the neighborhood believes him to be and showers him with gifts.
Eastwood is at his crunchiest and most crotchety here; it's as if he had a severe case of heartburn for two hours and didn't want to tell anyone directly. Kowalski never smiles; he grimaces and grits his teeth, but he's never happy, sort of emblematic of the character's entire life. As the local priest notes, Walt knows a lot about death (having killed men in Korea) but almost nothing about life. No, this isn't a movie about a bad man's eternal salvation, it's more about a man doing what a man's gotta do. And that includes not only saving the family from the thugs on occasion but taking Thao under his wing and teaching him how to be a man.
Gran Torino is overtly racist, but it skirts the line of offensiveness through the use of hyperbole. Walt Kowalski uses every ethnic slur in the book (except, notably, the n word), sometimes to great comic effect. Even when he's insulting everyone, we don't feel he's insulting us personally, so we're not as aggrieved by his vocabulary choices. Eastwood is convincing as the seething rage machine, and he has a fine supporting cast. The movie is a little longer than one would hope (that is, it ended a bit longer than I thought it should), but it's an effective and highly evocative story of a man's quest for inner peace.