Useful Small Messages

Rating: 8/10 (27 January 2009)

The great virtue of a movie in which the development and message really don't make you think is that it can be a medium for small messages along the way (in jurisprudence, "obiter dicta"). These do not decide the merit of the movie overall. In Gran Torino are some useful small messages.
Haircuts are useful for drawing the line between acceptable appearance and looking like a wild hermit. When Walt Kowalski, the Clint Eastwood character, is reproached by his barber for being "too cheap" to get haircuts often enough, men have to consider the value of a good haircut. This even though the dialogue is also humorous.
Some members of the audience, particularly when the economy has been heading south, do try to budget by postponements of haircuts. The glory day of long hair wearing is, alas, no more. When youth in Eastwood's 1970s wore long hair, it actually stood for some transcending social cause. Nowadays, that cause can be only music, rebellion against an unidentified norm, narcotics, or---saving dough. Even if one is in rebellion, this movie raises the question, Is it clear to all who look upon the wild hermit looking individual as to exactly who or what the long hair opposes? Is it even vaguely apparent to anyone as to what the long hair might oppose? Usually, the offensive appearance and the vagueness of message combine to discourage busy people from seeking more knowledge of the individual and finding out.
Youth in America are discouraged very often from talking and relating to kids their age, older adults, and persons of the opposite gender. This movie indicates this along the way, too, since it does not anywhere suggest that Thao, to whom Kowalski gives advice, is suffering from a shyness that is common.
Thao is shy because he must speak to girls but his mother and a sister are raising him---the father is absent from the household. This is common nowadays. The presence of the father in the household was a cause defeated by the insistence that women are perfectly capable of raising children on their own, a cause of the women's rights movement.
Many other youth in the country are handicapped by technological entrapment. Makers of cellphones and Ipods provide almost no instructions on when and where to use their devices, although their instructions on how to make them function can distract users from speaking about other things that actually matter. We thus have among us many youth who, whenever they feel any uncertainty as to what to say, are amply encouraged by advertisement to turn on their cellphone or hook their Ipod headphones around their head.
It is along the way that Eastwood also indicates this social failure of our youth. Thao is shy, and Kowalski's own granddaughter craves her cellphone during her grandmother's funeral. Kowalski's own efforts to override the social failure amount to little more than an indication that it exists.
Kowalski tries to encourage Thao to speak up among adults. He is trained in a barbershop to talk as offensively as Kowalski to the barber, with humorous rather than useful consequences. Nonetheless, Eastwood wants viewers to believe that it is wise to inculcate aggressive and offensive language in at least shy urban youth. The point is debatable. We wonder whether a movie showing street gang urban youth how to talk cooperatively and politely would be more useful to the cause of social justice that Eastwood's movie promotes.