Easily funnier than any comedy, heartbreaking and heartwarming

Rating: 10/10 (11 January 2009)

I wouldn't know how to start in heaping more and more praise on a movie like this. This was the sort of movie that cinema is made for. Even being a hard R-rated dramatic character study, it manages to be not just lightly humorous, but outright laugh-out-loud hilarious in almost every scene, without ever disrupting the tone of the movie or the mood.
The film is indeed about Walt Kowalski, which Clint Eastwood plays in a way not far from the movie personas that made him famous, and yet easily encompassing how someone would imagine someone like Dirty Harry as an 80+ year old man. He seems as though he's not "Clint Eastwood playing a crusty old racist" but rather "A crusty old racist playing himself". No matter how many racist terms he tosses out, it's always in a way that doesn't seem in any way out of the ordinary or like too much of a step for Eastwood to draw out in his acting.
And so many of the scenes from the snarling stares given to his family and friends during his wife's funeral, to chewing out priest Janovich, sparring with Sue back and forth, there's always hilarity to be had when he starts growling or mumbling something in a voice close to Batman in "The Dark Knight".
Yet despite his cantankerousness, racism, and stubborn need to be self-sufficient, he never ventures into the realm of disgusting or (overly)violent; he seems just as ready to string out a racist rant against ghetto-looking street thugs as he is against sheet-wearing hillbillies.
The burgeoning friendship that builds between Walt and Thao is sweet without stepping into being saccharine, and the climax of the film is intense, causing a great change in Walt that would seem fully unexpected in a movie character, yet in this context is not only done brilliantly, but Clint Eastwood develops his character so thoroughly, that he becomes the character as deeply and richly as Daniel Day-Lewis did Daniel Plainview in "There Will Be Blood": You fully believe Walt Kowalski could be a real person. He is in no way a hero or a villain, but just a normal person.
To the end of the film, Walt remains an unrepentant racist and bitter, cantankerous old man hateful of almost anything, but where his own family is alienated from his life, he seems to gain a new one in the form of Thao and his family.